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By Root 1315 0

people sometimes are, emotionally inept – his friend, rival and successor as foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, once remarked that ‘Were any of us to die suddenly, he would dine out that night with undisturbed complacency, and in the intervals of conversation or bridge, would be heard to murmur, “Poor old George.” ’ In November 1917, the sixty-nine-year-old Balfour was past the pinnacle of his career (he had previously been leader of the Conservative party and Prime Minister) and was serving as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government. He had already supported a scheme to build a Jewish homeland in colonial east Africa. The Balfour Declaration, which now shifted this commitment to Palestine, was worthy of the man whose name it bore, and has been accurately described by one eminent historian as ‘about as intelligible as the Athanasian Creed’.

The attractions for the British in yet another opaque document were obvious enough. But the audacity of the pledge was staggering: they were offering land belonging to one people as a gift to another, and disregarding the fact that the whole area lay within a different empire altogether. The promise of a homeland ensured Jewish support for the war effort and, by clothing British imperialism in the garments of Zionism, would also appeal to the Americans. The British would be there to see fair play between Jews and Arabs. But the reason for the convoluted form of words in the letter sent to the Anglo-Jewish leader Lord Rothschild was that the British recognized the trouble it could cause:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their 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.

At the time, Palestine was over 90 per cent Arab.

The tortuous form of words has the stamp of a committee all over it, and, moreover, a British committee – sophisticated, ponderous and, on contentious points, oblique. What was ‘a national home’? What would the British actually do if the ‘civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’ were compromised or violated? The cabinet wasn’t much bothered: the document which Jews claimed gave the state of Israel its founding legitimacy was just one of several agreements knocked out in the region. Cynical doesn’t really seem to do justice to the British behaviour. ‘I do not deny that this is an adventure,’ Balfour declared later. ‘Are we never to have adventures? Are we never to try new experiments?’ As for the Arabs who were to be dispossessed, he hoped that ‘they will not grudge that small notch – for it is no more geographically, whatever it may be historically – that small notch in what are now Arab territories being given to people who for all these hundreds of years have been separated from it … That is the first difficulty. That can be got over and will be got over by mutual goodwill.’

If only everyone would see that nothing matters very much.

Britain emerged from the First World War battered and broke. Yet even though it was poorer, its empire was even larger. The British had learned from earlier experiences of empire and created thrones in the Middle East, on which sat pliant Anglophiles with British advisers, high commissioners and residents. These generally well-upholstered and harmless figures sent their sons to English schools and had armies trained, equipped and often commanded by British officers. Expanses of desert and mountain across which tribes wandered with herds of sheep and goats were turned into states. ‘I had a well-spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the Iraq,’ wrote Gertrude Bell, the ‘oriental secretary’ at the British High Commission in Baghdad, to her father on 4 December 1921. So much of the shape of the unstable state the British created in Mesopotamia