Bible and Sword (47 page)

Article 4 provides that “an appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognized as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine.” Article 6 undertakes to “facilitate Jewish immigration and encourage close settlement by Jews on the
land.” Article 7 provides for the “acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews.” Thus four of the first seven articles dealt with the position of the Jews; the remaining twenty-one articles were technical. The Arabs, nowhere mentioned by name, were referred to only as “other sections of the population” or as “various peoples and communities” whose civil and religious rights and personal status were to be safeguarded. “Unquestionably,” concluded the Peel Commission in 1937, “the primary purpose of the Mandate,
as expressed in its preamble and its articles
, is to promote the establishment of the Jewish National Home.”

Lord Peel perhaps put the qualifying phrase in italics to indicate that there was also an unexpressed purpose of the Mandate: the imperialist purpose of the “strategical buffer.” But in the Wilsonian era imperialist purposes were better left unmentioned. The logic of the sword had for over a hundred years been leading Britain physically to the Middle East. But for far longer than that the influence of the Bible had been at work, and it had established a pattern in which it became impossible to acquire the Holy Land simply as a “strategical buffer.” A larger purpose and a higher aim had to be served. Thus, when Palestine came within reach Britain was trapped by her own history. In spite of uncomplicated imperialist intentions of the old school, conscience complicated matters terribly. It allowed Britain to acquire Palestine only by making room for the original owners. It put her, to her dismay, in the role of accoucheur to a new state.

For, regardless of the diplomatic egg dance in which Weizmann as well as the British government carefully stepped around any mention of the word “state,” there was no question in anybody’s mind that this was what was eventually contemplated. Balfour saw it clearly and said as much to the Cabinet when the final draft of the Declaration came up for decision. In explaining the phrase “National Home” he said that it did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an “independent Jewish State,”
but that this “was a matter of gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution.” This was what the Cabinet understood by their own act. “There could be no doubt,” the prime minister, Lloyd George, told the Peel Commission twenty years later, “as to what the Cabinet then had in mind. It was not their idea that a Jewish state should be set up immediately by the Peace Treaty.… On the other hand it was contemplated that when the time arrived for according representative institutions to Palestine, if the Jews had meanwhile responded to the opportunity afforded to them and had been a definite majority of the inhabitants, then Palestine would thus become a Jewish Commonwealth.”

Other members of the War Cabinet were no less explicit. Mr. Churchill in an article for the press in 1920 foresaw “the creation in our lifetime by the banks of the Jordan of a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown.” General Smuts put it further off but foretold “in generations to come a great Jewish State rising there once more.” In short, as the Peel Commission summed up the spoken and written evidence of the time, the nation’s leaders and the press accepted the Mandate “in terms which could only mean that they contemplated the eventual establishment of a Jewish State.”

Like another noble experiment the Mandate was flatly not a success. Its epitaph was spoken by Winston Churchill when the White Paper of 1939 canceled further Jewish immigration and land purchase thus ending the hope of a national home. “This,” he said, “is the breach, this is the violation of the pledge, this is the abandonment of the Balfour Declaration, this is the end of the vision, of the hope, of the dream.”

Yet the Mandate served a purpose. If to the British it was a perpetual headache and to the Arabs a national insult—or so they chose to regard it—to the Jews it was an opportunity, almost but not quite fatal. From the ruin of all the high hopes they wrested, by force of arms, at least the first half of that magic formula, “political independence and territorial integrity,” the
sine qua non
of statehood. The tragedy did not lie in the necessity of fighting for independence (for an independence that is conferred and not fought for rarely endures) but in the enmity needlessly created which has defeated the dream of a regenerated Palestine restoring a lost influence and raising the moral and material status of the whole Middle East. Whether the political ambitions of the Jews or the intransigeance of the Arabs or the weakness of the British was chiefly responsible for the failure depends upon the individual point of view, at least while history is still smoking. Only a time-conferred objectivity can provide a final judgment.

Palestine was never more than a “small notch,” as Balfour said, in the vast expanse of Arab lands freed by British arms after the last war. To the Arabs it represented one per cent of the area over which they were being given self-government by the British. To the Jews it represented their only hope of ever recovering home, country, and statehood. The framers of the Mandate, recognizing the relative equities involved, assumed under its terms a primary obligation toward the Jews. From the moment when the later and fatal fiction of a dual responsibility toward Arabs and Jews alike was adopted, the Mandate became unworkable.

Perhaps the fault was in the times. In another era less dominated by what Edmund Burke once called “the irresistible operation of feeble councils,” the Mandate might have had a chance. Instead it became a long effort by Britain to escape the consequences that conscience had committed her to. The original pledge, which she soon found was awkward to keep, she attempted thereafter to whittle away, to invalidate, and at last, desperately weary of the entanglement, to cancel. The final years were spent in an attempt to stay on in Palestine as Mandatory after having repudiated the terms of the Mandate, until this position too became no longer tenable. “We decamp ignominiously,” said Leopold Amery, another former colonial secretary, “amid carnage and confusion.”

Does Israel, then, exist today because of the British or in spite of the British? As in the American colonies, England had laid the foundations of a state and then resisted the logical development of what she had begun until the original bond frayed out in bitterness and strife. The answer to the question must be neither one thing nor the other, but partly both—one of those unsatisfactory truths with which history so often defeats its interpreters.

The author owes a profound debt to three sources of learning: The New York Public Library, Central Branch, without whose facilities this book could not have been written; the
Dictionary of National Biography
, edited by Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee (referred to in the Notes as DNB); and Nahum Sokolow’s
History of Zionism
, a pathfinding work of an earlier generation (now out of print), which pointed the way for this study.

The lists of Works Consulted which follow are in no sense meant as complete bibliographies of the subjects covered in the several chapters. They contain the essential sources but not general background material.

The abbreviations PPTS and EETS used in the Notes refer respectively to the Palestine Pilgrims Text Society and the Early English Text Society.