The Balfour Declaration 9: Ignoring The Facts

The Arab cause was severely handicapped because it had no voice at the heart of the Secret Elite and no champion in Parliament. Financial and industrial powers wanted control of the resources under the sands and cared little for the indigenous population. In fact the Arabs were mere pawns in a larger game of international chess. Even at the lesser levels of power, they had no influential advocate. They were disadvantaged at every turn. T E Lawrence, who fought side by side with Faisal and the Husseins, knew that he was merely part of a conspiracy.

Lawrence had personally endorsed the promises made by the British cabinet, assuring the Arabs that their reward would be self-government. He wrote of ‘our essential insincerity’, of his conviction that ‘it was better we win and break our word, than lose’ the war in Arabia. His much heralded relationship with the Arabs was underpinned by fraud and he knew it. [1] Lawrence’s comments were made in relation to the Sykes-Picot agreement of which he had been fully informed. He was not party to the Balfour Declaration, but his Zionist sympathies later became apparent.

The Machiavellian intrigues which took place in London and Washington added a deeper level to this deceit. It had been argued that the British government, and A J Balfour in particular, did not fully realise what they were doing when they approved the fateful decision to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This was patently untrue. Two of the most experienced politicians in the British Empire, Lord George Curzon, former viceroy and Governor-General of India and Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, both lobbied the War Cabinet against entering into an agreement with the Zionists without a much fuller analysis of what that would mean. Their Cabinet papers on The Future of Palestine [2] and Zionism [3] should have been taken seriously, but were ignored. Indeed their views were presented to the War Cabinet so late in the day that it had the feel of a cosmetic device to imply some kind of balanced judgement. Mere dressing.

Curzon agonised about conditions in Palestine where the Turks had broken up or dislocated Jewish colonies and warned that after the ravages of war and centuries of neglect and misrule, any revival would depend on a colossal investment. He warned that Palestine had no natural wealth. The land contained no mineral wealth, no coal, no iron ore, no copper gold or silver. Crucially Curzon alluded to a more immediate problem. What would happen to the non-Jewish inhabitants? He estimated that there were ‘over half a million Syrian Arabs – a mixed community with Arab, Hebrew, Canaanite, Greek Egyptian and possibly Crusader blood. They and their forefathers have occupied the country for the best part of 1,500 years. They own the soil…they profess the Mohammedan faith. They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter.’ [4]

He also informed Cabinet that anyone who glibly dreamt of a Jewish Capital in Jerusalem did not appreciate the complexity of the ‘holy places.’ Too many people and too many religions had such a passionate and permanent interest that any such outcome was not even ‘dimly possible.’ His final warning was profoundly clear: ‘In my judgement, it [Zionism] is a policy very widely removed from the romantic and idealistic aspirations of many Zionist leaders whose literature I have studied, and whatever it does, it will not in my judgement provide either a national, a material or even a spiritual home for any more than a very small section of the Jewish people.’[5] His analysis was superb. His words were left to gather dust on the cabinet shelves and have been ignored because they destroyed the illusion which Zionists repeated about a land without people waiting for a people without land.

Edwin Montagu’s Cabinet paper on Zionism was distributed at the same meeting. It included a highly perceptive report from Miss Gertrude Lowthian Bell, the acting Political Officer in Baghdad. The Oxford educated writer and sometimes British Intelligence operative pointed out that: ‘Jewish immigration has been artificially fostered by doles and subventions from millionaire co-religionists in Europe; [The most prolific giver of doles and subventions was Edmund de Rothschild] …The pious hope that an independent Jewish state may some day be established in Palestine no doubt exists though it must be questioned whether among local Jews there is any acute desire to see it realised, except as a means to escape from Turkish oppression; it is perhaps more lively in the breasts of those who live far from the rocky Palestine hills and have no intention of changing their domicile.’ Lord Cromer took pleasure in relating a conversation he held on the subject with one of the best known English Jews who observed: ‘If a Jewish kingdom were to be established in Jerusalem, I should lose no time in applying for the post of Ambassador in London.’ [6] Tantalisingly, Cromer was not prepared to name the alleged wit.

Gertrude Bell’s acutely accurate observation held the key to understanding what was happening. The clarion call to a Jewish homeland in Palestine came not from the small Jewish communities which had been established there or the few more recent immigrant settlers. Naturally those Jews who, together with their Arab and Muslim neighbours, had suffered under the harsh Turkish yoke, welcomed change. What she questioned was the validity of those who canvassed for a ‘homeland’ to which they had no intention to return. How many of those Britons or Americans who supported the idea of a Jewish homeland, actively considered packing their bags and moving to a community in Palestine? This was not the message that the Secret Elite wished to consider.

Edwin Montagu was the second British Jew to hold a cabinet post and held the office of secretary of state for India. He had a keen interest in Muslim affairs and his concerns reflected an awareness of such sensitivities. Montagu made an observation about Chaim Weizmann which resonated with the evidence which we have already presented. In recognising Weizmann’s services to the Allied cause and his reputation as an exceptional chemist, he reminded the Cabinet that Weizmann was a religious fanatic, a zealot for whom Zionism had been the guiding principle for a large part of his life. He saw in Weizmann’s over-whelming enthusiasm, an inability to take into account the feelings of those from his own religion who differed from his view or, and herein lay a critical point, those of other religions whom Weizmann’s activities, if successful, would dispossess.[7]

In an attempt to dispel the assumption that Weizmann’s brand of Zionism was widely supported within the Jewish community in Britain, Montagu added a list of prominent British Jews active in public life whom he termed Anti-Zionist. It included Professors, Rabbis, Jewish members of the Government (Sir Alfred Mond and Lord Reading ) three Rothschilds, Sir Marcus Samuel (of Royal Dutch / Shell) and many more British Jews.[8] He begged the war cabinet to pause and think before it ignored the British voice of the many Jews who had ‘lived for generations in this country, and who feel themselves to be Englishmen.’  [9] He countered claims that American Jews were in favour of Zionism by quoting from the Convention of the Central Conference of Jewish Rabbis held in June 1917: ‘The religious Israel, having the sanctions of history, must not be sacrificed to the purely racial Israel of modern times.’ Note how the term Israel was used. Jacob Schiff’s views were included with specific emphasis on his belief that ‘ no effort should be made to re-establish a Jewish nation…’ Similar sentiments from leading French and Italian Jews were included.

These were very deep-felt pleas. Curzon’s warning ought to have alerted the experienced politicians in the war Cabinet. Milner had gone to war with the Boers to protect the Empire and its gold-mines, but General Smuts knew how easily native populations resented incomers who laid claim to their land. Sir Edward Carson had brought Ireland to the brink of civil war in 1914 over the rights of different communities in the North and South of that island. Surely he was aware of the tensions caused by any threat to introduce different values to old cultures. In truth, the Secret Elite had come to its conclusion, and no other view was welcomed. Their concern was the future of the British Empire which had to be of paramount importance in every circumstance. Advice from Curzon and Montagu was ignored. Curzon ought to have had the courage to resign, but acquiesced in silence when the vote was taken [10]

1. T. E.Lawrence, Seven Pillars, pp. 5-6.
2. National Archives, Cabinet Papers:CAB 24/30.
3. National Archives, Cabinet Papers:CAB 24/28.
4. National Archives, Cabinet Papers: CAB 24/30 p. 2.
5. Ibid., p. 3.
6. Ibid., p.4.
7. National Archives, Cabinet Papers:GT- 2263 p. 1.
8. National Archives, Cabinet Papers:CAB 24/28, GT 2263.
9. Ibid., p. 2.
10. Ibid., p. 3.

The Balfour Declaration 8 : The Arab Land That Everyone Wanted.

At the start of the First World War, the lands which we have come to know as the Middle East lay in a great sweep from the Caspian to the Red Sea. It comprised a hotchpotch of factions and tribes, communities born into religious friction, wastelands and deserts, remote townships and cities with Biblical names. The Ottoman Empire had held these areas in subjugation by fear and cruelty. T E Lawrence, the legendary hero of the Arab rising of 1916, described the jig-saw-puzzle nature of the native peoples in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. [1] He painted a detailed picture of a colourful land comprising many religions and cultures with little sense of tolerance. Ansariyas, distrustful of Islam, colonies of Syrian Christians, Armenians and Druses were to be found to the north from the Euphrates Valley down to the southern coast of the Mediterranean. Kurds populated the territory to the north-east and they hated, in strict order, the native Christians, then the Turks and finally all Europeans. There were settled Arabs to the east of Aleppo, semi-pastoral Moslem communities, Bedouins and some Ismaili outcasts. Between Tripoli and Beirut, Lebanese Christians, Maronite or Greek, united in their disdain for Muslims but barely tolerated each other. On the banks of the Jordan valley, Algerian refugees faced Jewish villages. These too were diverse in nature with traditional Hebrew scholars on the one hand and, on the other, recent German in-comers with European-style houses paid for from charitable funds.

Lawrence thought that the land of Palestine seemed too small, too impoverished, to absorb settlers. Galilee was apparently more tolerant of newcomers than Judea. Feuds abounded. Druses hated Maronites and indulged in periodic blood-letting. Muslim Arabs despised them with a vengeance. Around Jerusalem, the German-speaking Jews ‘were obliged to survive’ side by side with ‘sullen Palestinian peasants’ whom Lawrence described as ‘more stupid than the yeomen of North Syria, material as the Egyptians and bankrupt.’ [2] Such racist stereotyping from an upper-crust, patronising English gentleman demands reply. Were the Felhaini, whose ancestors had worked the land for thousands of years, not entitled to be sullen when their lands were taken over by foreign strangers? There was an intrinsic difference between the old settlers, with whom the Arabs had co-operated on friendly terms for generations, and the new breed of imperialistic colonists who confronted the native Arabs with threats of violence. [3]
To the south, running along the Red Sea, was the Hejaz in which lay the holy places, Mecca and Medina.

The great cities of Jerusalem, Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, Hama and Homs had a distinctive nature and admixture of religion and history. Jerusalem had its own unique quality. As Lawrence saw it, ‘Jerusalem was a squalid town, which every Semitic [4] religion had made holy.’ [5] Behind his much acclaimed commitment to Arab nationalism and his knowledge of Arab strengths and weaknesses, T E Lawrence had great sympathy for Zionism. [6]

The land known as Palestine had a population of some 500,000 Moslems, 60,000 Jews and a similar number of Christians. [7] A British War Cabinet paper written by Lord Curzon noted that under the Turkish yoke there was no country called Palestine, ‘because it was divided between the sank of Jerusalem and the vilayets of Syria and Beirut.’ [8] He estimated that there were between 600-700,000 inhabitants of whom less that one quarter were Jews. What he described was a patchwork of largely poor communities and tribes, disunited and distrusting, hardly a blade away from each other’s throat. It was no single people’s homeland but was, most certainly, predominantly Arab.

Yet the Young Turks achieved the near impossible feat of uniting all classes of culture and creed against the Ottoman by suppressing them with ruthless cruelty. [9] In Syria, the Arabs, the largest of the indigenous natives, were treated with contempt, their culture and language suppressed, their societies disbanded, their leaders proscribed. The Turks tried to crush Arab nationalism but the Arabs had watched what had happened to the Armenians who had been isolated and systematically wiped out, and sought to establish their own sovereign land.[10] To achieve that, they needed allies who would stand by them agains the hated Turk.

The importance of the Arab populations to the Allied war effort cannot be over-stated. Kitchener, when he was Consul-General in Cairo from 1911-14, was well aware of the desert undercurrents; the shifting sands of loyalty and treachery which his spies reported. His first priority was to safeguard British imperial interests. He knew that the Arab dream of independence was rooted in Hussein, the Sherif of Mecca, and his sons, whose ambition was to gather a vast Arab confederacy under the suzerainty of their family and reconstitute an Arab Empire. [11] Though bogged down in the mire of the Western Front, Kitchener retained his relationship with the Husseins, custodian of Islam’s holiest shrines, and when the futile attack on the Dardanelles was deliberately allowed to fail (see Chapters 9-10), they hoped that an Arab alliance with Britain would neutralise the chances of the Ottoman sultan-caliph’s call to jihad. The British wanted ‘to rob the call to Holy War of its principal thunderbolt’, by striking an agreement with Hussein themselves. [12]

Consequently, the foreign office instructed Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt to offer Hussein of Mecca, Britain’s commitment to an independent Arab state in a ‘firm and lasting alliance, the immediate results of which will be the expulsion of the Turks from the Arab countries…’ [13]  This formal promise was given in October 1915. [14] Palestine was included in the areas which the British government pledged would be an independent Arab country. [15] The Arab uprising against Turkish rule was based on that unambiguous promise.

The foreign office then proceeded to make a very different pact with the French. An Arab Bureau had been created in January 1916 to harmonise a wide range of political activity in the near East to keep a watchful eye on the German-Turkish activities and co-ordinate propaganda. An interdepartmental conference agreed the need for a single Bureau stationed at Cairo to focus on Arab activities. Amongst the select group which made this decision was Captain W F [‘Blinker’ ]Hall, the Director of Intelligence at the admiralty, Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet secretary and Sir Mark Sykes at the foreign office. [16]

Britain’s commitment to the Arabs was short-lived and utterly worthless. Rarely have a people been promised so much then denied their just deserts with such callous disregard. Sir Mark Sykes was instructed by the foreign office to negotiate the redistribution of Turkish lands with Charles Georges-Picot, the former French consul-general in Beirut and the Quai d’Orsay’s adviser on Middle Eastern affairs. They secretly agreed the future boundaries of the Arab lands which would be dismantled and shared between them when the war was won. The Czarist Foreign Secretary Sazonov was also involved since the Russians had been clearly promised a share of the rotting Ottoman carcass.

Lines were drawn by Sykes and Picot to delineate a French Zone, which would include all of Syria north of Acre and west of Damascus and Aleppo, and a British Zone comprising the Tigris and Euphrates from north of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf across northern Arabia to what later became Jordan. Palestine would be a jointly controlled allied responsibility.[17] For centuries, classical scholars had used different names and interpretations to describe the land sometimes called Asia Minor or Mesopotamia and Syria. Although no country had actually been called Palestine, the name emerged as a geographical term current in the so-called Christian world to include the ‘Holy Land’.[18] While the Arab tribes were rising against the Turks in the desert, their faithless British Allies were double-crossing them.

Sir Edward Grey believed that Sykes had been too generous in agreeing the territorial split, but vitally, he had forestalled any rift in the Franco-British alliance.[19] This is a remarkable claim. British foreign policy was never left in the hands of a minor official. If Grey believed that Sykes had avoided a rift with France over the future spoils in the Near East then that was the main purpose of the exercise. It was an agreed position whose ultimate worth would be determined once the war was won. What we do know is that the Director of Naval Intelligence, William Reginald Hall, indicated that ‘France’s claim to Palestine cannot be justified’. [20] The British government played fast and loose with all of its allies.

Thus two violently opposite arrangements were agreed. The first was a clear pledge to the Arabs; the second was an act of betrayal which would deny them the promise of full independence. Critically, the Arabs knew nothing about the Sykes-Picot pact and remained in the dark until the Bolshevik’s came to power in Russia and unmasked the secret double-cross.

1. T E Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, pp. 256-260.
2. Ibid., p. 259.
3. Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, The Authorised Biography, pp 606-7.
4. The three main Semitic religions are Judaism, Islam and Christianity, They are related by a common belief in God, the hereafter and the constant battle between good and evil.
5. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, p. 260.
6. [http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418688/lawrence-arabia-was-zionist-benjamin-weinthal
7. Doreen Ingrams, Palestine Papers, p.1.
8. CAB /24/30 The Future of Palestine, p. 2.
9. Robert Fisk, The Great War for civilisation, The conquest of the Middle East, pp. 400-401.
10. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, p. 24.
11. Liddell Hart, T E Lawrence, p. 61.
12. Dr Peter Shamrock, A Lapse into Clarity. The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence Revisited, paper given at the Balfour Project conference October 2015, http://www.balfourproject.org/the-mcmahon-hussein-correspondence-revisited/
13. http://www.balfourproject.org/translation-of-a-letter-from-mcmahon-to-husayn-october-24-1915/
14. CAB 27/24
15. Doreen Ingrams, Palestine Papers, p. 48.
16. FO 882/2; ARB/15/3 p. 6.
17. Liddell Hart, Lawrence, pp. 69-70.
18. Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and Creation of the Modern Middle East, p. 48.
19. Lawrence James, ‘Sykes, Sir Mark, sixth baronet (1879–1919)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
20. Mayir Verete, The Balfour Declaration and its Makers, Middle Eastern Studies, 6 (1), January 1970, p. 54.

The Balfour Declaration 7: Clandestine Plots Scupper A Peace Initiative.

Conscious that the final resolution to the war would be critical to the Zionist claims on Palestine, their British and American leaders became increasingly involved in a secretive network aimed at influencing government policy. The three month period between April and June 1917 was peppered with urgent cables between Louis Brandeis in Washington and, Chaim Weizmann and James Rothschild in London, updating each other about privileged meetings, current opinions and actions to be taken to advance the Zionist plan.[1] Unknown to elected politicians and cabinet members in both countries, these men operated a clandestine cell of Zionist interest whose specific purpose was to normalise, validate and protect the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Their targets were A J Balfour in Britain and President Woodrow Wilson in the United States. The British foreign secretary was known to be sympathetic; the American president had yet to indicate his approval.

Even before America had formally declared war on Germany (6 April, 1917), the London cabal insisted that increased pressure be brought on the President to support the Zionist cause. Every opportunity which presented itself had to be taken. Urged by the American Ambassador at London, Walter Page, the British Government decided to send a distinguished commission to the United States on the day before America declared war on Germany. [2] America’s entry profoundly altered the ground rules because neutrality was no longer an issue for the Atlantic powers, but did not change the ultimate aim to crush Germany. Lloyd George chose the near seventy-year old Arthur Balfour, former prime minister and current foreign secretary, to lead the charm offensive to Washington.

A J Balfour’s mission to the United States in 1917 proved a crucial turning point. The foreign secretary had been primed by Weizmann to speak with Brandeis when he was in Washington. The two men were introduced at a reception in the White House on 23 April and Balfour was reported to have greeted the Judge with ‘ You are one of the Americans I had wanted to meet.’ [3] Why, other than to gauge the strength of American-Jewish support for a homeland in Palestine? They met several times, but not in the White House. Over the following days and unknown to the President, his Supreme Court Judge and the visiting British foreign secretary had their first private breakfast together. [4] What was a on the menu for discussion was kept secret.

Balfour was in Washington to bolster the Allied cause and he and the President’s main advisor, Mandell House, specifically discussed the terms which might be imposed on Germany once it had been destroyed. On 28 April, Balfour produced a map of Europe and Asia Minor (one of the terms used to cover the Middle Eastern states largely within the Ottoman Empire) on which was traced the results of the secret treaties and agreements with Britain and France which will be examined in a later blog. They had, in Houses’ words, ‘divided up the bear-skin before the bear was dead.’ [5] Interestingly, Constantinople no longer featured as a probable Russian possession [6] but there was no indication of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. None.

One he was informed of this, Brandeis felt obliged to intervene. He had a forty-five minute meeting with Wilson on 6 May to assure him that the establishment of a Jewish Palestine was completely in line with the President’s concept of a just settlement. The British Zionists wanted assurance that their American compatriots approved the general plan for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and would publicise their support. Pressure had to be applied on both sides of the Atlantic. On 9 May, Brandeis sent a cable to James Rothschild in which he announced the American Zionist approval for the British programme. [7]  This was followed by another secret morning discussion with Balfour and on 15 May, Brandeis reported back to Weizmann and Rothschild that their objective had been successful. The precise wording in his cable demonstrated the extent to which the leading Zionists on both sides of the Atlantic were actively influencing their respective governments. Brandeis’s cable read: ‘Interviews both with President and Balfour were eminently satisfactory confirming our previous impressions as to reliable support in both directions. Presented views in line with your program [but] was assured that present circumstances did not make Government utterances desirable.’ [8] Private conversations between the President and the visiting foreign secretary were secretly passed across the Atlantic without compunction in contravention of a variety of secrecy acts. Whose national interest was being served?

Louis Brandeis continued to press Wilson for a public commitment to a Jewish homeland, but caution was advised. His cable to James Rothschild on 23 May stated that Balfour told him: ‘if we exercised patience and allowed events to take their natural course, we would obtain more’. According to Brandeis, President Wilson was reluctant to make a public declaration because the United States was not at war with Turkey. So much for the notion that Judge Brandeis limited his activities to matters of law. His secret collusion with British Zionists should have raised concerns about a conflict of interest but that paled into insignificance when compared with his involvement in destroying a clandestine American peace-mission to Turkey.

In early June 1917 an extremely concerned Louis Brandeis made an urgent call to London. The Zionist plans were suddenly threatened by an unexpected and unwelcome intervention about which none of them had the slightest warning. Brandeis discovered that a secret American delegation, headed by the former United States Ambassador at Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, was on its way to Switzerland. Its purpose was to convince Turkey to break away from the German-Austrian alliance, an action which would have radically altered the geo-political situation when the war ended. Indeed, if successful, it would have shortened the war.

Former ambassador Morgenthau believed that a combination of German domination and war famine was making life unbearable in Turkey. Even the Young Turks had become ‘heartily sick of their German masters’ [9] Henry Morgenthau thought that he understood the Turkish mind. His plan was to go to Switzerland to meet former members of the Ottoman cabinet and offer generous peace terms and ‘any other means’ (by that he meant bribes) to encourage them to abandon their allies. Initially Robert Lansing the US secretary of state, talked over the proposal with Arthur Balfour. The British foreign secretary suggested that since Switzerland was ridden with spies, Morgenthau should use Egypt as a base… as if Egypt wasn’t riddled with spies? It afforded the very plausible excuse that the American delegation was concerned with the condition of Jews in Palestine. Lansing agreed and an American Zionist, Felix Frankfurter, was added to the official delegation. One flaw surfaced almost immediately after Morgenthau set off for Europe. The mission had been sanctioned without due consideration to its possible consequences for Zionism.

Judge Louis Brandeis learned about the venture after the Americans had departed for a rendezvous with their Allied compatriots in Europe. [10] He immediately understood the mortal danger which any such rapprochement with the Turks would bring to the Zionist ambitions. Brandeis alerted Chaim Weizmann. They both realised that these negotiations could completely undermine their carefully constructed plans. In June 1917 there was no Jewish homeland. The very concept was at best paper-talk and had yet to be formally accepted by any of the major powers. A generous settlement for the Turks which might have left Palestine and Arabia intact, would have destroyed the Zionist ambitions before the world war had ended.

In London, Weizmann’s contacts at the foreign office confirmed Brandeis’s anxiety. He learned that the proposed British contingent which was scheduled to join Morgenthau contained envoys whom he did not consider as ‘proper persons’ for such a mission. [11] Since when did unelected observers make decisions on who was or was not a ‘proper person’ to undertake a foreign office assignment? Weizmann turned to C P Scott his Manchester journalist friend, and within a matter of days was invited to speak behind closed doors with foreign secretary Balfour, recently returned from Washington.

What emerged was an astonishing acknowledgement of Zionist complicity in scuttling the American mission. In complete secrecy, Balfour appointed Chaim Weizmann as the British representative to meet Morgenthau. Not a career diplomat. Not a Jewish member of the House of Lords or Commons. He gave the task to a ‘proper person’. The leader of the Zionist movement in Britain, Chaim Weizmann, was formally appointed by the foreign office as Britain’s representative to a secret mission which, had it been allowed to progress unmolested, could radically have shortened the war. Weizmann was given a formidable set of credentials, his own intelligence officer and the responsibility to stop Henry Morgenthau in his tracks.[12]

Chaim Weizmann grasped the opportunity. The Secret Elite chose to use him for their own ends. Their ultimate plan not only for Palestine, but the entire Middle East, would have been seriously compromised had Morgenthau successfully disengaged Turkey from the war. For the Zionists it was imperative that their ambition for a homeland in Palestine was approved by one of the great Powers before the fighting ceased. Chaim Weizmann, accompanied by Sir Ronald Graham [13] and Lord Walter Rothschild met Balfour again. They put one condition on the table. The time had come for a definitive declaration of support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This had to be acknowledged – urgently, incase an unexpected peace closed down the opportunity. Balfour agreed. In fact he did more than agree. He asked Chaim Weizmann to submit a form of words that would satisfy the Zionist aspiration, and promised to take it to Lloyd George’s War Cabinet.[14] Here was the golden chance which could not be missed. This was the starting point for the formal declaration which would be endorsed by the war cabinet and called The Balfour Declaration.

Behind the scenes in America, Louis Brandeis succeeded in completely overturning the original position held by Robert Lansing at the Department of State. The plan which had been given official sanction had to be scuppered. On 25 June, while Morgenthau was en-route across the Atlantic on the SS Buenos Aires, an urgent telegram was sent from Washington to Balfour alerting the British to Morgenthau’s arrival in Europe. Lansing specifically stated that ‘it is considerably important that ‘Chaim Weizmann meet Mr Morgenthau at Gibraltar’. [15] How extraordinary. Secretary Lansing requested that his own former ambassador should meet Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the British Zionists before proceeding further. On the same day he instructed the American Ambassador (Willard) at Madrid to ensure that, as soon as he landed, Morgenthau fully understood that he was ordered to go to Gibraltar to meet Weizmann. This instruction was to be sent by ‘special red code strictly confidential’ [16] Who was in charge of American foreign policy, Lansing or Brandeis? No matter. They certainly meant to stop Morganthau.

While the choice of Weizmann as the main British negotiator was inspired, it was little wonder that his involvement, and indeed the whole mission, was a closely guarded secret. The Americans were halted in Gibraltar, ostensibly to agree how the Turks might be approached. With all the weight and authority of his Zionist credentials, Chaim Weizmann pressed Morgenthau on his intentions. Why did he imagine that the Zionist organisations on either side of the Atlantic supported his actions? Did he realise that his proposals would compromise everything that Jewish organisations had been working towards? Realising what he was up against, Morganthau abandoned the mission within two days of Weizmann’s onslaught. He back-tracked to the comfort of Biarritz and left France on 12 July without informing Ambassador Willard of his future plans. [17]

His ego seriously dented, Morgenthau dispatched his own heart-felt complaint to Washington. Given the ease with which diplomatic telegrams could be intercepted, the Americans were appalled. He received a stinging rebuke from Lansing’s office which was as much for international consumption as it was for Morgenthau’s. The telegram read: ‘Department surprised and disturbed that your text seems to indicate you have been authorised to enter into negotiations which would lead to a separate peace with Turkey… Final instructions were to deal solely with the conditions of Jews in Palestine…under no circumstances confer, discuss or carry messages about internal situation in Turkey or a separate peace.’ [18] The aims of the Secret Elite and the political Zionist organisation began to move in tandem. Consider carefully what had happened.

Brandeis had interfered directly with the US State Department policy. Furthermore, he did not hesitate to pass secret information to Chaim Weizmann and James Rothschild in London so that Morgenthau’s plans would be thwarted, nominally by the British government. Weizmann, in turn, was ushered in as the foreign office solution. Though by 1917 he was a naturalised British citizen, Chaim Weizmann was no diplomat or civil servant. He was a Zealot for an unbending cause. By pitting a most able and skilled Jewish negotiator against a moderate (at best) American-Jewish diplomat, the Secret Elite approved an inspired appointment. Weizmann crushed Morgenthau with deep-felt passion. At an even deeper level of conspiracy Brandeis had nailed his colours, not to Old Glory, but to the Zionist flag borne by Chaim Weizmann and James Rothschild.

Weizmann the zealot lived for one purpose in 1917. His determination was absolute. He wrote to Philip Kerr, a Milner protege and one of Lloyd George’s ‘secretaries’: ‘Some Jews and non-Jews do not seem to realise one fundamental fact, that whatever happens we will get to Palestine.’ [19] And what of Louis Brandeis? He chose to promote and protect the Zionist vision of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in favour of an action which could well have ended the war before American troops landed in Europe. American lives or a Jewish homeland in Palestine? Did Louis Brandeis ever consider that thought?

Long after these events, in September 1922, President Warren G Harding affirmed the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine against the advice of his officials in the state department. [20] One of but a few who spoke out against a well-organised Jewish lobby was Professor E.B. Reed of Yale who had served as a Red Cross worker in Palestine for three and a half months in 1919. He testified that the Zionist programme would bring oppression to the Arab majority in Palestine, that it was illegal and violated Arab rights. [21] In his memoirs, Chaim Weizmann recalled, incorrectly, that Professor Reed was a Senator. What annoyed him was Reed’s accusation that the leaders of the Zionist movement were unworthy men, and that he (Weizmann) had prolonged the war by two years by undermining the Morgenthau mission. [22] Strange that Weizmann remained in such stubborn denial. Truly, he and his associates, had prolonged that damned war.

1.https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/XXII_THE_BALFOUR_MISSION_TO_THE_UNITED_STATES
2. Blanche E C Dugdale, Arthur J Balfour, Vol II, p. 231.
3. Richard Neb Lebow, Woodrow Wilson and the Balfour Declaration, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 40. No. 4 (Dec 1968) p. 507 footnote 22.
4. Charles Seymour, Mandell House vol.II pp. 42-3.
5. What an enlightening insight. The Tzar having been deposed, all promises to Russia could be abandoned with all haste.
6. Richard Neb Lebow, Woodrow Wilson and the Balfour Declaration, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 40. No. 4 (Dec 1968) p. 508 footnote 26.
7. Ibid.
8. Nevzat Uyanik, Dismantling the Ottoman Empire: Britain, America and the Armenian Question, pp. 62-63.
9. Memorandum of Henry Morgenthau’s Secret Mission, 10 June 1917, Robert Lansing Papers, Box 7, Folder 2. Quoted in Uyanik, Dismantling the Ottoman Empire, p. 63.
10. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 246.
11. Ibid., p. 247.
12. The British chief of staff in Egypt responsible for the safety of the Suez Canal. Married to daughter of Viscount Milner’s great friend, Lord Midleton. [I. S. Munro, ‘Graham, Sir Ronald William (1870–1949)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33505]
13. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 256.
14. United States Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States 1917, (FRUS) Supplement 2, The World War (1917) p. 109.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., p. 127.
17. Ibid., p. 129.
18. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 227.
19. S.J. Res. 191, 67th Congress, 2 Session, Congressional Record, Vol. LX11, part 5, p.5376.
20. The Lodge-Fish Resolution, Herbert Parzen, American Jewish Historical Quarterly, Vol. 60. no. 1 Zionism in America, (September 1970, p. 71.
21. Irwin Oder, American Zionism and the Congressional Resolution of 1922 on Palestine, Publications of the American-Jewish Historical Society, Vol. 45, No.1 (September 1955.) p. 44.
22. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 251.

The Balfour Declaration 6: Embraced by the Secret Elite.

Chaim Weizmann had a valuable friend, the journalist and editor, C P Scott. Later the proprietor of the Manchester Guardian, Scott was an Oxford-educated man of staunch Liberal leanings. He spent ten years as member of parliament for Leigh in Lancashire (1895-1905) and welcomed Lloyd George’s courage in opposing the Boer War. [1] Their friendship endured through tumultuous times and Lloyd George trusted C P Scott’s views. [2] The newspaper owner had befriended Chaim Weizmann when he was teaching at Manchester University and proved to be, in Weizmann’s words, ‘of incalculable value’. He pointed the Zionist leader towards the one Jewish member of Asquith’s government, Herbert Samuel, whom he believed, could be of great assistance.[3] Samuel was not a practising Jew and before the war had never spoken about Zionism. Despite this apparent lack of interest he proposed in November 1914, that Britain sponsor the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine after the war. [4] Was it co-incidence that on both sides of the Atlantic, influential Jewish financiers and politicians, Rothschild, Brandeis, Weizmann and Herbert Samuel looked ahead to the end of the war and appreciated the opportunity it would bring? Note the coincidence of both Brandeis and Samuel’s proposals in November 1914. According to his memoirs Samuel was inspired by being the first Jew ever to sit in the British cabinet and claimed that he turned to Chaim Weizmann for advice. [5] Consequently, he spoke to Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, about the future of Palestine. Samuel expressed his alarm at the prospect of this part of the world falling into the hands of any of the Continental Powers (including France) and stressed the strategic importance of that region to the British Empire. He professed his enthusiasm for a Jewish State in Palestine which would be ‘a centre of a new culture … a fountain of enlightenment’.[6]

What followed was a very curious breakfast-meeting of a pro-Zionist group, including Lloyd George, on 3 December 1914. The most intriguing part of the meeting, which Weizmann described in great detail in his autobiography, [7] was that Lloyd George apparently forgot all about it. In his own self-aggrandising memoirs the Welshman explicitly dated his first meeting with Chaim Weizmann from 1916 when the Manchester chemist, by that time a Professor at the university, worked for the ministry of munitions. Indeed the impression which Lloyd George deliberately tried to infer was that the later Balfour Declaration was a reward for Weizmann’s services to the British nation for his development of acetone as a source to enhance munitions. [8] What rubbish. [9] Why did he feel it necessary to falsify his own record? Lloyd George had been introduced to Chaim Weizmann on 3 December 1914 in the company of Herbert Samuel, C P Scott and Joshiah Wedgwood, and the sole topic of conversation, had been Palestine. [10] The then chancellor of the exchequer’s account is so ridiculous that we have to ask, what was he trying to hide? Did later developments in Palestine embarrass Lloyd George politically? Were there other secret influences from whom he had to deflect enquiry?

Herbert Samuel proved to be an important advocate for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. He promoted the idea both informally with fellow ministers and in January 1915 wrote a draft memorandum for the Cabinet in which he concluded that Palestine’s annexation to the British Empire, together with an active colonisation of Jewish settlers, was the best solution for Britain. [11] Prime Minister Asquith was not impressed. [12] When in March 1915 Samuel circulated his revised memorandum to all members of the Cabinet, Asquith was scathing in his dismissal, describing the proposals as ‘dithyrambic’, an educated put-down implying a wild, over-the-top, possibly wine-fuelled raving. He went further with a racist swipe which emphasised his disapproval of the very idea that ‘we should take Palestine, into which the scattered Jews c[oul]d swarm back from all quarters of the globe, and in due course claim Home Rule.’ [13] Insects swarm; not people. Asquith also ridiculed the notion that Lloyd George cared a whit about the future of Palestine, adding: ‘ Lloyd George … does not care a damn for the Jews or their past or their future, but thinks it would be an outrage to let the christian holy places pass into the possession or under the protectorate of Agnostic Atheistic France!’ [14] Why did Asquith find Lloyd George’s stance ‘curious’? Before taking office in 1906, Lloyd George’s legal firm had represented Theodore Herzl in his negotiations with the over the the Uganda proposal. It was he who submitted Herzl’s views on the offer to the British Government. [15] His association with Zionism was long-standing.

Other important politicians and cabinet ministers who responded positively to Herbert Samuel’s memorandum included Sir Edward Grey, Rufus Isaacs, Lord Chief Justice of England from 1913, Richard Haldane, who at that time was Lord Chancellor, Lord James Bryce, former Ambassador to the United States and Arthur J Balfour, [16] who was to become foreign secretary when Grey was replaced in 1916.

Alfred Milner was positively predisposed towards what he himself termed, the Jewish Race. In 1902 he wrote to the President of the Zionist Federation of South Africa: ‘I have known the Jews as excellent colonists at the Cape – industrious, law-abiding and thoroughly loyal’. [17] Herzl had written to Milner in 1903 putting forward his arguments for a Jewish National Home in Palestine and praised the bond which he believed ‘united us [Jews] all closely to your nation.’ [18] Weizmann valued the strength of Milner’s support. He believed that Milner profoundly understood that the Jews alone were capable of rebuilding Palestine, and of giving it a place in the modern family of nations. [19] Such nonsense should have been summarily dismissed but Milner had more immediate concerns, amongst which the strategic defence of the Empire was a powerful motivator. The Secret Elite understood the natural advantage to be gained from a pliant Jewish-Palestine which would protect the western side of the Suez canal and all of the concomitant interests in Persia.

Weizmann held individual discussions with a stream of Secret Elite politicians and agents. Naturally he endowed each with qualities and perceptions which supported Zionism. [20] He specifically targeted Lloyd George’s minders in the Downing Street Garden suburb, [21] His subliminal message was hardly difficult to understand; Britain should trust in a Jewish homeland in Palestine to protect the Suez Canal and the gateway to Persia and India. Weizmann had a further advantage. He understood the matriarchal power inside the Jewish household and sought to use it to his advantage. For example, when James de Rothschild was serving in the British army, Weizmann befriended his wife Dorothy Pinto and ‘won her over’ to Zionism. Jessica Rothschild, wife of Nathan’s second son, Charles, also proved to be a valuable asset and willingly helped the Zionist leader to widen his contacts inside London Society.

And it came to pass that the people of influence, mostly powerfully rich Jews, adopted Chaim Weizmann. The English Zionist Federation office in Fulbourne Street in the East End of London had become too small to meet the demands placed on it by 1917. Weizmann would have us believe that ‘after much consideration and heart-searching we decided to open an office at 175 Piccadilly’. So innocuously put; so entirely misleading. From the East End to Piccadilly was a massive step on its own, but to 175 Piccadilly? To become near neighbours of their friends in ‘Rothschild Row’? [22] How wonderful. Yet that was not the important point. What mattered was that the English Zionist Federation was absorbed into Empire House, the home of Milner’s Round Table Quarterly Review, [23] at the heart of the very court of influence which dominated British political thinking. Weizmann and his organisation were literally embraced by the Secret Elite’s inner-most think-tank. 175 Piccadilly became the hub ‘towards which generated everything in Zionist life’. [24] Incredible. One building, two organs of political influence and a shared interest. 175 Piccadilly was a very significant address. Its importance was kept well away from public scrutiny.

Louis Brandeis and Chaim Weizmann were intimately involved in promoting Zionist intentions behind the backs of their political allies. But they hid it well. Louis Brandeis’s biographer, Alphas Thomas Mason was authorised and approved by the Supreme Court Judge himself and given full access to all his public papers, notebooks, diaries, memoranda, archived letters and personal correspondence. [25] Yet in his 240,000-word scholarly work, only two small paragraphs, ten lines in total, cover Brandeis’s feverish activities between April and June 1917. [26] The truth, to which we now turn, is far more revealing.

1. Trevor Wilson, Scott, Charles Prestwich (1846–1932)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.
2. They did fall out for a year in1920-21 over Ireland.
3 Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 190.
4. Bernard Wasserstein, ‘Samuel, Herbert Louis, first Viscount Samuel (1870–1963)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
5. Viscount Samuel, Memoirs, p. 139.
6. Ibid., pp. 140-142.
7. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 191.
8. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 348-9.
9. Oscar K Rabinowicz, Fifty Years of Zionism, p. 69.
10. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 192.
11 Viscount Samuel, Memoirs, p.142.
12. Micheal and Eleanor Brock, HH Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley. p. 406.
13. Ibid., p. 477.
14. Ibid.
15. http://www.jta.org/1931/01/15/archive/mr-lloyd-george-was-legal-adviser-to-dr-herzl-on-uganda-project-and-submitted-dr-herzls-views-to
16. Viscount Samuel, Memoirs, pp.143-4.
17. Vladimir Halpern, Lord Milner and the Empire, p. 169.
18. Ibid., p. 170.
19. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 226.
20. Ibid., p. 241.
21 J A Turner, The Historical Journal vol.20, No 1 (March 1977) p. 165-184.
22. Fredric Bedoire and Robert Tanner, The Jewish Contribution to Modern Architrecture, 1830-1930, p. 131.
23. Walter Nimmocks, Milner’s Young Men, p.166.
24. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 232.
25. Mason, Brandeis – A Free Man’s Life, p. vii.
26. Ibid., p. 452-3.

The Balfour Declaration 5: Zionism in America; The Rise of Louis Brandeis

Russian persecution also precipitated a wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to America in the first decade of the century, [1] but attempts to organise Zionist societies across the United States failed to ignite early enthusiasms. With two or three exceptions, the wealthy Jews in America would have nothing to do with Zionism in any shape or form.[2] The settled and prosperous upper-class, mostly German Jews, believed in assimilation. Their wealth and social position proved to them that the melting pot analogy was working. Above all, they did not want anyone to question their loyalty to America or embrace an ideology that might rock their well-provisioned boat by advocating the creation of a foreign country specifically for Jews.[3] That might prove an uncomfortable transformation, especially if the argument focussed on the theft of an already Arab country or a the need for Jews to go and live there.

On the other hand it appeared that some poorer immigrants, were becoming more vocal in their support, though it was not backed by an evident desire to move from the ‘Land of the Free’ to the sands of Palestine. The Jewish leaders in America, Jacob Schiff and Rabbi I.M. Wise claimed that ‘America is our Zion’.[4] The Jewish community in America was at best divided. There was no groundswell in the Zionists’ favour and the State Department dismissed them as a minority political group without money, influence or social standing.[5] They were not listening. Slowly a generation of new Zionists began to assert itself amongst the aspiring middle-classes of teachers, lawyers, businessmen and professors. They required a leader to champion their cause.

The flag-bearer for Zionism in the United States, Louis Brandeis, was a Boston lawyer hailed as a champion of the people. As early as 1890 he had created a legal storm with an article in the Harvard Law Review, a Citizens Right to Privacy.[6] In 1905 he successfully challenged the J P Morgan banking and financial conglomerate over a proposed railroad merger, raged against the abuses of monopolies and championed women’s working rights in a high-profile court case against the State of Oregon.[7] Brandeis was widely considered dangerous by his opponents because he couldn’t be bought. Outrageous anti-Jewish rants were vented against him by magazines and journals owned or part-financed by the New Haven Railroad Company when he spoke out against their abuses.[8] Unbowed and unbroken Brandeis fought them and won.

Louis Brandeis was attracted to Zionism fairly late in his life. He first came into contact with Eastern European Jews amongst the New York garment workers whom he supported in the great strike of 1910. Burgeoning anti-Semitism in Boston and his own encounters with prejudice influenced his attraction to the Zionist cause and in an interview with the Jewish Advocate in 1910 he openly acknowledged his sympathy for Zionism. [9] Within two years it had become his life’s purpose.

On 30 August, 1914, barely a month into the war, an extraordinary conference of American Zionists took place in New York at which Louis Brandeis, the Boston Lawyer, was unanimously elected leader of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs. His reputation electrified the Jewish community. Here was a leader of national standing with the reputation of a fearless champion of the people.[10] He brought respect and authority to this post and under his direction a stream of other leaders in American Jewish life were attracted to the Zionist movement. He believed in a cultural pluralism in which ethnic groups retained their unique identity as did Americans of Scottish, Irish, German or any other nationality. His message was that there was no inconsistency between loyalty to America and loyalty to Jewry. Although some European Zionists viewed this as an anaemic adaptation of their own passion,[11] Brandeis ’s approach to Zionism succeeded in encouraging far greater support in America for a ‘homeland’ in Palestine. That did not, however, infer their intention to go and live there.[12] Ever.

Brandeis’s magnetism in Jewish circles was further enhanced by President Wilson’s surprise decision to appoint him to the vacant position on the Supreme Court on 28 January, 1916. [13] His many detractors gave vent to their anti-jewish bile in a firestorm of protest. Newspapers called Louis Brandeis a red-hot radical; the Sun declared that it was the Senate’s duty to ‘protect the Supreme Court from such an utterly and ridiculously unfit appointment’. According to The Press President Wilson had never made a worse mistake than his nomination of Brandeis. It added, ‘if he fails to withdraw it, the United States Senate should throw it out.’ [14] The Zionist leader had to endure six months of unrelenting abuse from opponents before winning Senate approval in June 1916.

The transformation of Mr Brandeis into Justice Brandeis should have reduced his active involvement in the Zionist movement. Not so. Louis Brandeis’s influence and power increased a hundred-fold. Clearly his official involvement in overt Jewish matters should have been reduced to a minimum, but he held on to all the reins of influence.[15] He remained in daily communication by telephone, telegraph and conference with all the other leaders of the movement, and little escaped his attention. Brandeis was in the business of recruitment. He clearly understood the power that ordinary Jewish voters could wield at the ballot-box. But the struggle within American Jewry for control of their own community between the exceptionally wealthy few and the masses, descended into bitter accusation and counter-accusation.

Jacob Schiff, the New York financier, head of the great Kuhn Loeb banking firm was the foremost Jewish financier in the United States. His philanthropy towards Jewish causes was legendary. Nevertheless, in June 1916 he was shocked by the personal attacks levelled against him. He had originally held himself aloof from Theodore Herzl and overtly political Zionism and in a speech at the Central Jewish Institute, he was reported to have said that Jews in Russia had brought many of their troubles upon themselves because they ‘kept apart as a separate people’. [16]

Schiff always claimed that he had been misrepresented by the pro-Zionist Jewish press; that he had been unfairly and improperly maligned. He told the New York Times that he had been warned that his opposition to the Jewish Congress movement would result in such an attack. Schiff revealed that the Zionists were determined to undermine Jewish confidence in him in a well orchestrated plan; that whatever he said, they would attack him. He was gravely hurt by the allegations and swore that Zionism, Jewish nationalism, the Congress Movement and Jewish politics in any form was thereafter a closed book.[17] Schiff’s anger subsided later and he was persuaded to help the Jews in Palestine, provided the project could be presented to him as unrelated to Zionism.

The message was clear. Zionism was not to be crossed, even by the richest of its own co-religionists. There was an unsubtle message in this character assassination. No matter how rich, how influential, how generous, no-one would be allowed to criticise the Zionist agenda. No-one. Many others have suffered similar fates since.

Louis Brandeis grew in stature. He had the President’s ear. Precisely why remains a matter of conjecture. Allegations have been voiced that Wilson was blackmailed into making the appointment by a lawyer, Samuel Untermeyer. This has never been proved. [18] Formerly, as an adviser to Woodrow Wilson, Brandeis helped to broker the compromise that led to the adoption of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 without which U S bankers could not have financed the world war.[19]

Viewed from that angle one might question the purity of his anti-trust reputation. Though he should have kept his responsibilities as a Supreme Court Judge separate from the workings of the Department of State, which had responsibility for all international dealings, Brandeis made his views on Palestine clear. He approached Woodrow Wilson directly on the issue of Palestine and ‘obtained verbal assurances’ on his and the allied policy in Palestine. In an article in the New Statesman and Nation in November 1914, he argued that Palestine should become a British protectorate. [20] Consider that date. In November 1914, the idea that Palestine should become a British Protectorate was planted by an American Zionist three years ahead of the more general Balfour Declaration. In what depth of fertile soil did it germinate?

For very many Jews who had suffered directly from Russian brutality, supporting the Allies was emotionally difficult. Many could not understand how the British in particular could fight side by side with the hated Romanovs. Brandeis saw beyond that hatred. Above all, he knew that America had to be involved in any international congress which would be empowered to settle the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. He looked to Chaim Weizmann, his fellow Zionist leader across the Atlantic to help find a form of commitment which would deliver Palestine to the Jews.[21]

1. Sampter, A Guide to Zionism, p. 71.
2. Ibid, p. 73.
3. Donald Neff, Fallen Pillars, Chapter 1, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/fallenpillars.htm
4. Ibid.
5. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/fallenpillars.htm
6. Warren and Brandeis, Harvard Law Review, Vol. IV    December 15, 1890 No. 5, The Right To Privacy.
7. Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908).
8. George R Conroy, editor of the ironically titled magazine, Truth, penned a much quoted and often re-quoted allegation against Brandeis that linked him to the Jewish banker Jacob Schiff. It was one of many wild allegations made against Louis Brandeis to discredit him.
9. Jonathan D Sarna, Louis D Brandeis: Zionist Leader, Brandeis Review, winter 1992.
10. Sampter, A Guide to Zionism, p. 81.
11. Neff, Fallen Pillars, Chapter 1, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/fallenpillars.htm
12. Donald Lloyd Neff was an American historian and journalist. Originally from Pennsylvania, he spent 16 years working for Time, and was a former Time bureau chief in Israel. He also worked for the Washington Star. It is said that his work was erased from history for reporting on Palestine.
13. New York Times, 29 January 1916. p.1.
14. Ibid. p. 3.
15. Alphas Thomas Mason, Brandeis – A Free Man’s Life, p. 451.
16. New York Times 5 June 1916.
17. Ibid.18. A number of magazines and internet blogs have carried this story. No proof has been produced.

19. Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, pp. 220-21.
20. Mason, Brandeis – A Free Man’s Life, p. 452.
21. Ibid., pp. 451-2.

 

The Balfour Declaration 4: Early Zionist Roots in Britain.

The term Zionism was coined in the late nineteenth century to represent the movement for the return of the Jewish people to their so-called ‘historic homeland’ in Palestine, though from the start the term was interpreted in different ways by different Jewish and non-Jewish communities. It grew from small beginnings in the second half of the nineteenth century,  but had sufficient numbers in the last years of that millennium to contemplate an international congress.

The First Zionist Congress was held in Basle between the 29th and 31st of August, 1897, and was can be gleaned by the photograph above, these delegates were drawn mainly from middle-class European jews. Its aim was to have a recognised ‘and legally secured’ home in Palestine.[1] Chaired by Theodore Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist and keen Jewish activist, the meeting of around 200 participants created the World Zionist Organisation. Who could have known that from such small beginnings a new State would eventually emerge? Small in number, these Zionists were dedicated zealots. Their stance was absolute. They accepted no criticism. They belittled as enemies those many Jews who believed in assimilation into the countries in which they lived and who questioned Zionism’s political aims. Yet there was no popular, widespread enthusiasm for the ‘homeland’ proposal.

At the Second Basle Congress one year later it was clear that very few Jews were interested in the political aims. There was no clamour for radical change. Consequently, the Zionist emphasis was altered. Herzl recognised the need to galvanise Jewish communities, most of whom remained ignorant of, or completely disinterested in, or positively against, the idea of Zionism.

In December 1901 a Jewish National Fund (JNF) was established in Britain to acquire land in Palestine as the ‘inalienable estate of the Jewish people’.[2] It is entirely dubious whether any international law validated such an ‘inalienable’ right, but what is important is that the JNF was part of the slow and barely successful process of encouraging Jewish settlers to go to Palestine. Yet the focus on Palestine was one from which Zionists were not to be turned. We should not forget that the suffering and desperation of many Jews, especially in Russia, whose anti-Jewish pogroms were a barbarous indictment of the Romanov Empire, pressed heavily on the evolving Zionist movement. From their vantage point it was a refugee crisis which no-one else was minded to solve.

Of the major world Powers, Britain was the most progressively liberal in its attitude towards Jewish assimilation. Wealthy Jews in banking, finance and business were increasingly included in what was known as ‘society’. There were Jewish Members of Parliament; Jews ennobled and given membership of the House of Lords. Jewish refugees from the Russian pogroms settled in the slums in the East End of London and other major cities. Life was far from easy for the masses of impoverished immigrants, but Britain was a comparative safe haven and more welcoming than France. The nascent cries for a ‘homeland’ did not come from the ordinary Jewish refugee, but from the Zionist lobby which had begun to assert itself at the turn of the century. And there was sympathy for the Zionist desire for a national homeland inside the corridors of power in London. The problem was that the solution which was offered was not the one that Zionists wanted.

A British offer of an autonomous homeland for Jewish settlers in East Africa [3]  was considered at the Sixth Congress in 1903 and the Zionists reluctantly agreed to send a delegation to examine the practicalities of a Jewish settlement in Uganda. They turned it down. Unsuitable. The Zionists had no intention of resettling in Uganda. Ever. It was not the ‘promised land’. Another approach to the British government about the possible colonisation of a strip of territory on the southern boundary of Palestine and Egypt called El Arish had been secretly conducted by Theodore Herzl, but was also found to be impractical.[4] What mattered was that some British politicians appeared sympathetic to the aspirations of political Zionists.

Herzl died in 1904, and after a considerable struggle, Chaim Weizmann emerged as a charismatic and persuasive Zionist leader. He dominated the Eighth Congress in 1907 and managed to fuse together its political and the practical divisions into what was termed ‘Synthetic Zionism’, a hybrid between political zionism and more practical approaches. Weizmann built on common links between a variety of Zionist groups. Progress was slow. Numbers remained comparatively small, but Palestine was always the ultimate target for a ‘national homeland’. [5]

It seems strange that in his seminal work The Anglo-American Establishment, Professor Carroll Quigley made no mention of Chaim Weizmann’s activities in Britain before or during the First World War. This is all the more puzzling when we unpick Weizmann’s many and frequent associations with the key political forces inside the elite British establishment. He penetrated the hidden web of political influence as no other previously had. Every possible door was opened to him and anything that might prove incriminating, that smelled of collusion, removed from the historic record. [6]  Weizmann operated as the Zionist leader in Britain from 1904-5 onwards, meeting political sympathisers, using his contacts and building up a network of relationships which proved vital to his cause.

Chaim Weizmann initially met Arthur Balfour, formerly Conservative leader during the general election of 1906, [7] at a time when Lord Nathaniel Rothschild worked closely with his Secret Elite colleague. [8] Balfour wanted to know why the Zionists had turned down the British government’s practical solution of a settlement in Uganda? Weizmann spelled out his philosophy with absolute clarity. He dwelt on the spiritual side of Zionism and his ‘deeply religious conviction’ that only Palestine would do. In his eyes, any deflection from Palestine, was ‘a form of idolatry,’  [9] an interesting form of words, rooted in religious abhorrence. He professed that Palestine had a magic and romantic appeal for the Jews; that no other homeland could energise the Jewish people to build up and make habitable, what he deemed, a wasteland. Palestine was not a wasteland nor was it uninhabited. In peddling this misconception, Weizmann was very persuasive. His was not the policy advocated by the wealthy Jews who had made such important strides in British society. This was not an Englishman, proud to be English … and a Jew. Weizmann was not a privileged Rothschild or one of the many other rich upper-middle class Englishmen of Jewish faith who had been completely assimilated into British society. Weizmann was a Zionist zealot. Lord Nathaniel Rothschild was, apparently not.

Chaim Weizmann had one particularly influential mentor who knew precisely the names of the prime decision-makers in Britain. He was a Rothschild – Baron Edmond de Rothschild, head of the French branch of the banking dynasty. Edmond de Rothschild also believed passionately in Palestine. He had funded the establishment of Jewish settlements between 1880-95 and was later hailed as the father of Jewish colonisation.[10] Although the initial months of the war looked bleak for France and her allies, Edmond de Rothschild was convinced of ultimate victory, even in 1914. His advice to Weizmann, whom he considered a capable leader, reflected the forward nature of Zionist thinking. He could see that this was the opportunity. That moment, in the first months of a murderous world war, was the time to act so ‘we might not be forgotten in the general settlement’ . [11] Consider that advice. Edmund de Rothschild forewarned Weizmann that war would ultimately end in a settlement of conflicting claims, and the Zionists had to act immediately to ensure that theirs was included. Chaim Weizmann’s task was to influence British statesmen and politicians to support the Zionist cause in Palestine. It is inconceivable that Rothschild would have failed to identify the key personnel, the trusted agents and members of the Secret Elite whose support was vital to the Zionist ambition. When we analyse the list of men and women whom Weizmann targeted for support, there can be no other explanation, for they formed the core of the secret society that was revealed by Professor Quigley. [12] Weizmann may not have been fully aware of their one-world agenda but these were the people who could approve the transformation of Palestine from the unrequited holy grail to a Jewish state. They became his immediate targets.

British Zionism had a champion. His network of influence was firmly based on his Rothschild connections, and he knew whom he must influence to bring about the radical changes he vigorously pursued. As the pieces in this jigsaw begin to take shape, pay special attention to the clandestine involvement of our Secret Elite agents.

1. Jessie Ethel Sampter, A Guide to Zionism, p. 59.
2. Ibid., p. 64.
3. letter from Sir Clement Hill, chief of Protectorate Department, Foreign Office to Mr. L J Greenberg, 14 August 1903.
4. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, pp. 120-1.
5. Ibid., p. 121.
6. for example, no mention is made of Weizmann in Hankey’s Diaries. GBR/0014/HNKY or in Roskill’s masterly volume on Hankey up to 1918.
7. The 1906 election produced a landslide victory for Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal party and expelled A J Balfour from office until 1915.
8. Niall Ferguson,The House of Rothschild, The World’s Banker, 1849-1999, pp. 417-8.
9. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 143.
10. http://www.jta.org/1931/08/20/archive/baron-edmond-de-rothschild-86
11. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 189.
12. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 311-5.

The Balfour Declaration 3. Peeling the Onion: Secret Collusions.

The November 1917 Balfour Declaration was the final product of many interested parties with whom the Secret Elite was intimately involved. For over a century historians and journalists have focussed attention on the final outcome, the Balfour Declaration itself, but the process through which that brief letter of support was constructed clearly demonstrated the collusion of governments and lobbyists which spells out a conspiracy which has been ignored or airbrushed from the received history of the time. Take for example the role of Alfred Lord Milner, the central influence inside the Secret Elite and unelected member of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet.  At a previous Cabinet meeting on 4 October 1917, participants had considered a draft declaration written by Milner himself and influenced by his Round Table acolytes.

His draft specifically supported the view that the government should ‘favour the establishment of a National Home for the Jewish Race’.[1] The capitalisation of the term National Home was later altered, as was the very Milnerite phrase, ‘Jewish Race’. Lord Milner was a very precise thinker. While the words National Home implied that the Jewish people throughout the world should have a defined area to call their own, his version favoured ‘the establishment’ of such a place. It did not imply a return to a land over which they had assumed rights. Secondly, Alfred Milner held Race in great esteem. He defined himself with pride as a British ‘Race Patriot’.[2] His wording was a mark of respect. Others feared that it was a dangerous phrase which might be interpreted aggressively. It clashed with the concept of Jewish assimilation, like Jewish – Americans, and hinted that as a faith group, Jews belonged to a specific race of peoples. Consequently, his version was toned down.

Secretly, the War Cabinet decided to seek the opinion on the final wording of the declaration from both representative Zionists ( their phrase ) and those of the Jewish faith opposed to the idea of a national homeland. It is crucial to clearly understand that inside the international Jewish community there was a considerable difference of opinion in favour of, and against this idea of a Jewish ‘homeland’. That these groups were apparently given equal standing suggested that the Jewish community in Britain was equally split on the issue. They were not. The number of active Zionists was relatively small, but very influential.

Furthermore, the War Cabinet sought the American President’s opinion on the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine.[3] The minutes of the 245th meeting of the War Cabinet in London revealed that Woodrow Wilson was directly involved in the final draft of the Declaration. So too was his minder, Colonel Edward Mandell House [4] and America’s only Jewish Chief Justice, Louis Brandeis, [5]  both of whom telegrammed different views to the British government. [6] On 10 September, Mandell House indicated that the President advised caution before proceeding with a statement on a future Jewish homeland; on 27 September, Judge Brandeis cabled that the President was in entire sympathy with the declaration. Much can change in politics inside two and a half weeks.

As each layer of the onion is slowly peeled away from the hidden inner core of the eponymous Declaration, it becomes apparent that the given story has glossed over key figures and critical issues. There are hidden depths to this episode that mainstream historians have kept from public view and participants have deliberately misrepresented or omitted from their memoirs.

The previous minutes of the War Cabinet Committee held on 3 September 1917, showed that the earlier meeting had also been crammed with Secret Elite members and associates including Leo Amery, formerly Milner’s acolyte in South Africa. [7] Item two on the agenda revealed that ‘considerable correspondence… has been passed between the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (A.J.Balfour) and Lord Walter Rothschild…on the question of the policy to be adopted towards the Zionist movement.’ [8] What? ‘Considerable correspondence’ had been exchanged between Lord Rothschild and the Foreign Office; not a letter or enquiry, but considerable correspondence. A copy of one of these letters sent from the Rothschild mansion at 148 Piccadilly on 18 July 1917 has survived in the War Cabinet minutes. What it reveals shatters the illusion that the British government’s promise of support for a Jewish national home in Palestine stemmed exclusively from the foreign office under the pen of Arthur Balfour. Lord Rothschild’s letter began:

‘Dear Mr. Balfour,
At last I am able to send you the formula you asked me for. If his Majesty’s Government will send me a message on the lines of this formula, if they and you approve of it, I will hand it on to Zionist Federations and also announce it at a meeting called for that purpose…’ [9]

He enclosed his (Rothchild’s) recommendation for a draft declaration. It comprised two sentences: (1) His Majesty’s Government accepts the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people. (2) His Majesty’s Government will use its best endeavours to secure the achievement of this object and will discuss the necessary methods and means with the Zionist Organisations.’ [10]

Balfour’s reply ‘accepted the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted…and [we] will be ready to consider any suggestions on the subject which the Zionist Organisation may desire to lay before them.’ What? How do you ‘reconstitute’ a country? It might be interesting to consider the precedent that was being set. Could this mean that one day America might be reconstituted as a series of native Indian reserves or parts of England as Viking territory? Astonishingly, the Zionist movement was invited to dictate its designs for British foreign policy in Palestine. [11] This was not some form of loose involvement. It was complicity. Lloyd George’s government, through the war cabinet, colluded with the Zionist Federation to concoct a statement of intent that met their (Zionist) approval. Furthermore, it was agreed that such an important issue, namely the future of Palestine, should be discussed with Britain’s allies, and ‘more particularly with the United States’. [12] This action had all the hallmarks of an international conspiracy.

How many lies have been woven around the design and origins of the Balfour Declaration? Lord Walter Rothschild was the chief intermediary between the British government and the Zionist Federation. In this capacity he had been involved in the process of creating and formulating a new and explosive British commitment to the foundation of a Jewish home in Palestine. More than that, Rothschild and his associates sought to control ‘the methods and means’ by which it would be created. This mindset never wavered in the years that followed.

What influences had been activated to bring Lloyd George, in conjunction with Woodrow Wilson, to such a position by November 1917? Behind the scenes, who was pulling the strings? Who were these Zionists, and why were they given such immense support from the Secret Elite and, in particular, their British political agents? How could a minority group, suddenly command such power on both sides of the Atlantic? An exceedingly small minority group of no previous political or religious influence, whose ideology had been dismissed by many leading Rabbis as contrary to true Jewish belief, emerged as if from nowhere to strut the world stage. This did not happen by chance.

It happened by design. This we will demonstrate over the next few blogs.

1. National Archives: CAB 23/4/19 WC 245, p. 6.
2. A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 401.
3. National Archives: CAB 23/4/19 WC 245, p. 6.
4. National Archives:GT – 2015.
5. National Archives:GT – 2158.
6. National Archives:CAB 23/4/19 p. 5.
7. National Archives:CAB 23/4/1. WC. 227, p. 1.
8. National Archives:GT-1803 – The Zionist Movement.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. National Archives:CAB 24/24/4.
12. National Archives:CAB 23/4/1. WC 227, p. 2.

Balfour Declaration 2: The Fateful Letter.

LETTER FROM ARTHUR BALFOUR TO LORD WALTER ROTHSCHILD

Foreign Office
November 2 1917

Dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you on behalf of His Majesty’s Government the following Declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which have been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use its best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

I should be grateful if you would bring this Declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely,

(signed) ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR’ [1]

The above letter was released by the Foreign Office and printed in The Times on 9 November, 1917.

Why at this critical juncture did the British War Cabinet decide publicly to favour Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people? Our instinct is to redefine that question to ask: where did this fit into the Secret Elite’s strategy to crush Germany and advance its globalist ambition? How were these linked? How had it come about that a homeland for one specific religious group appeared on the post-war agenda as if it was a solution to an unspoken problem? Even if anyone believed the lie that the Allies were fighting for the rights of smaller nations, why had religious identity suddenly become an issue of nationhood? Had anyone considered giving Catholics such rights in Ireland or Muslims or Hindus such status in India? Was the world to be divided into exclusive religious territories? Of course not. To complicate matters further, one nation (Britain) solemnly promised a national home to what would become in time a second nation (the Jewish State of Israel) on the land which belonged to another people (Palestinian Arabs) while it was still an integral part of a fourth (the Ottoman /Turkish Empire). [2] In pandering to a relatively small group of Zionists, the Balfour Declaration was bizarre, deceitful and a deliberate betrayal of the loyal Arabs fighting in the desert war against the Turks. Perfidious Albion had rarely plumbed such duplicitous depths. What power did these Zionists hold over the British government to ensure their unquestioned co-operation in the first steps towards a Zionist state at the expense of the rightful owners of Palestine?

The absolute destruction of Germany and her Ottoman allies promised to pave the way for a re-drawing of maps and spheres of influence which would advance the Secret Elite’s overall strategy; namely the control of the English speaking elect over the world. The strategic sands of Arabia and the oil-rich lands of Persia, Syria and Mesopotamia had long been prime targets. These were the first in a number of prerequisites which would shape the Middle-East after 1919 to the advantage of Britain in particular. Critically, as a neutral, America had to be very careful about open intervention even after she had entered the war and to an extent Britain acted as her proxy in putting markers down for a new world order. It is important to remember that when early discussions about the future of a Jewish homeland in Palestine were in progress, little mention was made of American involvement. The truth is otherwise. America was deeply involved in secret intrigues both directly and indirectly.

So too were a small but influential groups of politicians and businessmen, English, American, French, Russian, men and women of the Jewish faith spread literally across the world, who supported a growing movement to establish a permanent homeland in Palestine. They were called Zionists. Take care with this term. Initially it included a range of Jewish groups which held different views and aspirations. Some saw Zionism as a purely religious manifestation of ‘Jewishness’; a small but intensely vocal group fostered political ambitions. This latter form of Zionism included those determined to ‘reconstitute’ a national home for their co-religionists.

In the words of the former Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon ‘a national home for the Jewish race or people’ implied a place where the Jews could be reassembled as a nation, and where ‘they [would] enjoy the privileges of an independent national existence’. [3] How do you reconstitute a nation? In truth, if the Ashkenaiz Jews were to be ‘reassembled’ it should have been along the Volga River in the true Khazarian ‘homeland’, not along the Jordan river in Palestine.

There were a small number of suggested sites for the proposed new homeland, including one in Uganda, but in the first years of the twentieth century a more determined Zionist element began to focus their attention on the former land of Judea in the Middle East. They spoke of the creation in Palestine of an autonomous Jewish State, a political entity composed of Jews, governed by Jews and administered mainly in their interests. In other words, the recreation of a mythical Jewish State as was claimed before the days of the so called ‘diaspora’.[4] Few voices were raised to ask what that meant, on what evidence it was predicated or how it might be justified? It was an assumed biblical truth. Not every Jew was a Zionist; far from it, and that is an important factor to which we will in due course return.

Frequently historians write versions of history which imply that an event ‘just happened’. In other words they begin at a point which creates the impression that there was no essential preamble, no other influence which underwrote the central action. One example is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. For generations, school pupils have been taught that this murder caused the First World War. Such nonsense helped deflect attention away from the true culprits. Another example can be found in the usual interpretation of the Balfour Declaration which has been described as the British Government’s note of approval for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people, as if it turned up one day on the Foreign Secretary’s desk and was signed like the other items in his out-tray. It has been downplayed; granted but a minor mention in the memoirs and diaries of the politicians who carefully orchestrated its single sentence. The Balfour Declaration was much more than a vague promise made by British politicians under the pressure of war’s contingency. Such a simple interpretation has conveniently masked the international pressures which the hidden powers on both sides of the Atlantic asserted in favour of a monumental policy decision which opened the door to the eventual establishment of the State of Israel.

At the 261st meeting of the British War Cabinet on 31 October, 1917, with prime minister Lloyd George in the Chair, the membership comprised Lord Curzon, Lord Milner, Andrew Bonar Law,(Conservative leader) Sir Edward Carson, G N Barnes (Labour Party), the South African General Jan Smuts and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour. This was the inner-circle formed mainly from the Secret Elite’s political agents to run the war. [5] They remained behind the closed doors of 10 Downing Street after other war business had been completed. The military and naval representatives were dismissed before the War Cabinet’s inner cabal proceeded to discuss the on-going issue of ‘The Zionist Movement’. As always, Lloyd George’s War Cabinet secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, recorded the minutes. This coterie of British imperialists and Secret Elite members and associates, agreed unanimously that ‘from a purely diplomatic and political point of view, it was desirable that some declaration favourable to the aspirations of the Jewish nationalists should now be made.’ [6] To that end a carefully constructed form of words was tabled and the War Cabinet authorised foreign secretary Balfour ‘to take a suitable opportunity of making the following declaration of sympathy with the Zionist aspiration’. It was no co-incidence that some five days previously the editor of The Times had urged them to make this statement. [7] The precise wording was as recorded at the beginning of this chapter [8] and unanimously approved by the War Cabinet.

While the seventy-eight words which comprise the core of Balfour Declaration have had an explosive impact on the history of the world right up to the present day, in our timeframe we must concentrate on the period between 1917 and the end of the war. Who was actually involved in the secret machinations, how did they manipulate opportunities to their own advantage and who financed and promoted the idea from its early origins to eventual realisation?

Two days after the War Cabinet’s decision a letter was sent from the Foreign Office to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild (2nd Baron Rothschild) in London asking that he ‘bring this Declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.’ It was signed Arthur James Balfour, and henceforth was known as The Balfour Declaration, though it was the product of many more minds than solely that of the British foreign secretary. [9] Its precise wording was publicised across the Jewish communities who hailed the letter as the beginning of a new epoch in their history. Despite the apparent care with which the War Cabinet attempted to lay down conditions to protect non-Jewish communities, in particular the rights of the Palestinian Arabs to whom the country belonged, the event was celebrated by Zionists across the world as a National Charter for a Jewish homeland.[10] The genie was out of the bottle.

In truth, the letter was the product of years of careful lobbying in both Britain and America. It was neither a beginning nor an end-point. Though the communication was essentially between the British government and the Zionist Federation in Britain, it had an almost casual feel to it as if it was simply a letter between two members of the English gentry, Balfour and Rothschild. The Declaration was far from casual and much more contrived than a gentleman’s agreement.

By all known processes of law and morality it was ridiculous. Consider the unprecedented nature of the proposal. Britain held no sovereign right whatsoever over Palestine or authority to dispose of the land.[11] As if this would not cause sufficient confusion, the British Foreign Office had already promised parts of Palestine to the French, to the Arabs who already owned the land, and finally, to the international Jewish community. Was there ever a better example of the wanton arrogance of the British imperialist ruling class? The very wording of the Balfour Declaration was ambiguous; the conditions set were impossible. What was meant by the phrase, ’a national home’? It had no clearly defined meaning in international law. How could a foreign government promise to achieve world-wide approval for a national home for Jews in an Arab country without automatically prejudicing the rights of the Arabs whose ancestors had lived there for thousands of years? [12] Its very vagueness gave rise to interpretations and expectations which were certain to cause bitter dispute. What was going on?

The answer can be found by examining earlier versions of this controversial document and the extent to which Zionists on both sides of the Atlantic strove to nurture and protect it.Far from any notion of their sudden conversion to Zionism, the political drive to establish a Jewish homeland in the sands of the desert, British politicians had been engaged in such discussions for several years. This fact had been conveniently omitted from official histories, memoirs and government statements.
1. CAB 23/4 WC 261, p. 6
2. The original quotation from which this observation is taken was made by Arthur Koestler, in Promise and Fulfilment, Palestine 1917- 1949, p. 4.
3. National Archives, War Cabinet Memorandum GT 2406.
4. CAB 24/30 ; GT 2406, p.1.
5. See blog: The Great British Coup, 1916: The End Of Democracy.
6. CAB 23/4, WC 261 p. 5.
7. The Times 26 October 1917, p.7.
8. CAB 23/4 WC 261, p. 6.
9. Letter from A J Balfour to Lord Rothschild, 2 November 1917.
10. Great Britain, Palestine and the Jews. Jewry’s Celebration Of Its National Charter – Anonymous pamphlet, 1917.
11. Sol M. Linowitz, Analysis of a Tinderbox: The Legal Basis for the State of Israel, American Bar Association Journal, Vol. 43, 1957, p. 523.
12. Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfilment, Palestine 1917- 1949, p. 4.

Balfour Declaration 1. Beware Mythistory

Possibly the most contentious centenary within the First World War was the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. It left in its wake so many controversies and is held to be the root of so much antagonism since that time, that we have made every effort to focus on its importance solely within the context of our narrative. In other words we have tried to limit our investigation to the events and personnel which shaped the Declaration, analyse its impact and consider the roles played by those directly and indirectly associated with the Secret Elite up to but not beyond 1919. For certain, the Balfour Declaration was not what it appeared to be when first announced in 1917. Its roots spread wide and deep; its impact in prolonging the war has been overwhelmed by later events. Historians have often ignored its real origins, its trans-Atlantic gestation and the frantic urgency which attended its delivery.

But first an explanation. Like many historical confusions which have been deliberately muddied by assumptions and lies, the concept of a jewish homeland in Palestine appeared, in the early twentieth century, to have unquestioned biblical certainty. People believed it as fact. Other views now challenge this ‘certainty’.

The distinguished Israeli historian, Shlomo Sand [1] risked more than his reputation, when in 2008, he published his re-examination of Jewish history, to expose ‘the conventional lies about the past’ [2] which, like all historical misrepresentations, served to justify the traditional narrative which the Elites have constructed to protect their primacy. He challenged the orthodox views from ‘the authorised agents of memory’ who had steadfastly denied any deviation from the received version of Jewish history. What a wonderful phrase – the authorised agents of memory- the voices of those, and only those, whose research and writings are accepted as truth. Professor Sand has since been shunned by establishment Zionist historians and castigated because he refused to use terms like ‘The Jewish people,’ ‘ancestral land’ ‘exile,’ ‘diaspora,’ ‘Eretz Israel,’ or ‘land of redemption’, which were key terms in the mythology of Israel’s national history. His refusal to employ them was held to be heretical. Shlomo Sand was not alone in such protests.

Those of us born into the Christian traditions were taught bible stories in school or at church – perhaps even from our parents. In the two-part theological litany of events (the Bible) as recorded by whom we will never know, the Old Testament was accepted as a history of the Jewish people despite a complete lack of evidence on which to base key assertions. Take for example the claim that the Jewish people were dispersed into exile by the Romans. Nowhere in the vast and well-documented records of the Roman Empire is there historical proof of a large refugee population around the borders of Judea after the three uprisings or wars in the first century C.E. as there would have been if a mass flight had taken place.[3] Many Jews may have fled Judea fearing for their lives, but the Roman conquerors did not enforce an exile. There was no Imperial edict. There was no systematic dispersal of the tribes of Israel.

Another Israeli historian, Adiyah Horon, insisted that there was no truth in the claim that an ‘exile’ occurred after the destruction [of the Temple] when the Emperors Titus and Hadrian supposedly expelled the Jews from Palestine. He too agreed that this idea, based on historical ignorance, derived from a hostile fabrication by the fathers of the Christian church who wanted to show that God punished the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus. [4 ]

The myth of uprooting and exile was fostered by the Christian legend, from which it flowed into Jewish tradition and grew to be the accepted ‘truth’ engraved in history. [5] More recently, the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe [6] Professor at Exeter University, has attacked the ‘foundational mythologies’ of Israeli history which insist that ‘Palestine was a land without people waiting on a people without land’.[7] This isn’t just bad history, it is patently wrong.

In 1976, Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-born naturalised British citizen of Jewish parentage, demonstrated another misconception in his remarkable book, The Thirteenth Tribe. The ancient Ashkenazi Jews, who today comprise most of the world’s population of Jews, sprang from barbarians living in the ancient empire of Khazaria between the Caspian and Black Seas. [8] In his masterpiece of world history, The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan, Director of the Centre for Byzantine Research at Oxford University, also explained the spread of Judaism in the ninth century when the Khazars chose to convert to that religion en masse, [9 ]which later raised speculation that they might be one of the lost tribes of ancient Israel. Not so. Many of these Jewish converts migrated to what is today Poland and Russia, but the evidence of history demonstrates that they had no link to ‘the holy land’ or ‘Palestine’.

Eran Elhaik, an Israeli geneticist, who served seven year in the Israeli Defence Force, and no critic of Israel, developed genome studies at John Hopkins University in America.[10] In tracing the geographical positioning of a number of Ashkenazi Jews, he found that their ancestral origins were not from the Middle East or indeed the Mediterranean but from a region that is now in north east Turkey.

This scientific evidence underscores the historical findings of Shlomo Sand and others that makes nonsense of the claims of an ancestral Jewish homeland and the diaspora. Don’t be misled by the clamour raised against these brave professional historians and scientists against whom disparaging, sometimes vile comments have been made, calling them ‘self-hating jews’.[11] To be pilloried by the establishment who seek to squash the truth, is a shameful consequence for those who question orthodox historical explanations, but typical in this modern era. It is a chilling thought, is it not, that ‘alternative facts’ were written up as official history at the end of the First World War, and predate the current explosion of lies by a full century.

The reason we have introduced our sections on the Balfour Declaration in this manner is to enable the reader who is considering the impact of the First World War, to understand that several major pronouncements were made about Palestine, its contemporary status and its future standing which would be more closely questioned today. Most educated people in Britain accepted the concept of the wandering Jews alienated from their biblical ‘homeland’ after a ‘diaspora’. The Christian tradition wallowed in such patronising postulation. The terms were widely unquestioned across national boundaries. Key politicians within the Secret Elite who considered themselves staunch Christians in the Anglican tradition did not challenge these beliefs for a second.

A renewal of Jewish aspirations for a ‘homeland’ had been on the march from the 1890s. It was termed Zionism and it appeared to have different interpretations for different parties amongst different Jewish communities. For some it was a religious expression; for a small but growing band, it was primarily a force which sought to assert Jewish ambitions in political terms.

At the end of the nineteenth century, concepts like a Jewish ‘homeland’ took on a fresh life of its own, especially inside the political Zionism which increasingly expressed itself in ‘national’ terms, as if it represented a nation-state. We will shortly examine this in greater depth. In the context of the Secret Elite’s attitude towards Palestine and Zionist claims in 1917, the following blogs will demonstrate why one faction, the political Zionists, and another, the Secret Elite and the Allies, successfully used each other to help move forward their specific agendas. We have used terms like ‘Jewish homeland’ and ‘diaspora’ not because we are in agreement with them, or hold them to be true, but because they were part of the language of the time. Bear this in mind as the narrative unfolds.

[1] Emeritus professor of History at Tel Aviv University and much published author
[2] Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, p. xi.
[3] Ibid., p. 131.
[4] Ibid. pp.134-5.
[5] Ibid. p. 130.
[6] Illan Pappe is an Israeli historian and socialist activist. He is a professor at the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter.
[7] Illan Pappe: History of Israel, Stolen Land of Palestine on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKGA48MptIY&t=965s
[8] Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe.
[9] Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads, pp. 111-114.
[10] Eran Elhaik, geneticist and former John Hopkin’s University post-doctoral researcher, currently lecturer at University of Sheffield.
[11] a term coined by Zionists who seek to denigrate those members of the Jewish faith or Israeli citizens who question their orthodox mythistory.