Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [271]
Balfour met Weizmann for the first time in 1906: “It was from that talk with Weizmann that I saw that the Jewish form of patriotism was unique. Their love of their country refused to be satisfied by the Uganda scheme.” In 1914 the two met again and, according to Weizmann, Balfour said with evident emotion, “It is a great cause you are working for; I would like you to come again and again.”11 Balfour was not Weizmann’s only conquest. Churchill, Sykes and C. P. Scott all became his supporters. Most important, so did Lloyd George.
Like Balfour, Lloyd George had grown up with the Bible. “I was taught far more about the history of the Jews than about the history of my own land. I could tell you all the kings of Israel. But I doubt whether I could have named half a dozen of the kings of England, and not more of the kings of Wales.” And were not the Welsh and the Jews really quite alike: religious, gifted and with a love of learning? Lloyd George was thrilled when British forces captured Jerusalem, “something which generations of the chivalry of Europe failed to attain.” His geography of Central Europe may have been shaky but he knew the Holy Land. (Indeed, his sweeping statement that the British mandate of Palestine must run from “Dan to Beersheba” caused endless problems at the Peace Conference as the experts poured over biblical atlases to try to find out what he really meant.) 12
In his time as minister of munitions during the war, Lloyd George liked to say that he had incurred a particular debt to Weizmann. Britain had been running desperately short of acetone, essential for making explosives. By chance, Weizmann was working on a process for producing it on a large scale. In a grand gesture he made it available to the British for the duration of the war without payment. When Lloyd George asked Weizmann to accept an honor from the king, the answer was “There is nothing I want for myself.” When Lloyd George pressed him, Weizmann asked for support for the Zionist cause. “That,” claimed Lloyd George in his memoirs, “was the fount and origin of the famous declaration about the National Home for the Jews in Palestine.” (The French had yet another theory; that Lloyd George had a mistress who was the wife of a prominent Jewish businessman.)13
Weizmann and his acetone made a wonderful story but British statesmen, for all their sentiment, would not do anything against Britain’s interests. By 1917, these appeared to be converging with Zionist goals. Weizmann wanted a Jewish Palestine and, as he pointed out, it would need protection for some years to come. He did not trust the French and was cool toward the Americans. Britain was not only powerful, but just and fair; in addition, “the fact that England is a biblical nation accounts for the spiritual affinity between them and the Jews.” With Jewish immigration, Palestine would become “an Asiatic Belgium” and an important strategic asset for the British empire. “Palestine is a natural continuation of Egypt and the barrier separating the Suez Canal from . . . the Black Sea.” 14 That argument made sense to Lloyd George, to the War Office, and to at least some in the Foreign Office. So much the better if it removed Palestine from the French, who had been promised it under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that wartime arrangement among the Allies to divide up the Arab Middle East. From 1917, with Lloyd George’s encouragement, Sykes met