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By Root 1177 0

had raised almost an entire army battalion from the tenants and workers on his Yorkshire estates and separately offered the government his expertise on the Ottoman Empire. Both were readily accepted. Sykes was given the job of reconciling the competing ambitions of Britain and France for the spoils of war when, as was expected, the Ottoman Empire was dismembered. Fortunately, since the French eyed Lebanon and Syria, while the British were after Transjordan and the oilfields of Iraq, Sykes and his French counterpart, Georges Picot, had a deal within a week. The two governments proclaimed a commitment to ‘recognise and protect an independent Arab state or a confederation of Arab states’, but the map they drew had lines sweeping across the Middle East, dividing it into zones shaded red or blue in which either Britain or France would have ‘control’. Only what remained was left to the Arabs.

On top of the understandings given to their French and Arab allies the British now made a third commitment. In November 1917 they told the Jews of their new-found enthusiasm for a homeland in Palestine. The Zionist project was not a British invention, of course. At the turn of the century Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian, had tried and failed to get the Turks to allow the creation of a Jewish home in Palestine. Chaim Weizmann, who was to die as president of the newly founded state of Israel, was Russian, but moved to Britain convinced that ‘England will understand the Zionists better than anyone else.’ This was partly because he had recognized the British people’s prevailing conviction about their mission in the world and he pitched Zionism to them as a means of securing the empire, while promising that Jewish settlement in Palestine ‘would develop the country, bring back civilization to it’. It was the sort of language the imperial British could understand. The influence of the Zionists upon the British ruling class had nothing much to do with their numbers inside the country: the 1911 census revealed there were no more than 120,000 Jews in Britain, most of them pretty recent refugees from persecution in Poland and Russia. But that meant that the British elite was not only well aware of the religious myths of Judaeo-Christianity, but well aware of anti-Semitism, too. And, unlike many of the indigenous Palestinians, for whom there was a generalized romantic attachment, the Zionists had assiduously cultivated friends in high places. Winston Churchill, for example, was one. In 1908 he had decided that the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East would not only offer Jews freedom from the danger of persecution, but would act as a ‘bridge between Europe and Africa, flanking the roads to the East’, and so would ‘be an immense advantage to the British Empire’.

Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary in whose name the declaration of support for a Jewish homeland was issued on 2 November 1917, was an unlikely father for the bloody tragedy of Palestine and is best known for the observation that ‘nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all’. Unfortunately, his statement of British attitudes to Palestine mattered very much indeed. Like Sir Mark Sykes, who had made the deal with the French, Balfour had been born immensely wealthy, inheriting a Scottish estate and a pile in St James’s which gave him the means to indulge his interest in philosophy without too many irritating distractions about having to keep the wolf from the door. Eton and Cambridge conferred the finical nicknames – ‘Pretty Fanny’, ‘Clara’, ‘the scented popinjay’ – which adorned his political career. If anything, he seemed to accentuate the foppishness to disguise a calculating and often ruthless character: a newspaper reporter watching him at the dispatch box in the House of Commons wrote that ‘Mr Balfour’s whole life seems to be a protest against being called upon to do anything but sniff a heavily perfumed handkerchief while he sprawls in poses of studied carelessness on the benches of the House of Commons.’ He was handsome, rich and clever, and, as fortunate