Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [272]
Curzon, who unlike most of his colleagues had actually been to Palestine, thought the Zionist dream absurd. “I cannot conceive a worse bondage,” he said, “to which to relegate an advanced and intellectual community.” He also asked an awkward question: “What is to become of the people of the country?” A much more passionate argument came from Montagu, the highly strung secretary of state for India, who thought Zionism a “mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom.” He himself was a Jew by faith but an Englishman by nationality. Was he now to be told that his true loyalty lay in Palestine? And what would that mean for the rights of Jews as citizens of other countries? The cabinet discounted these objections and by the end of October 1917 it had agreed on a formula. Sykes rushed out of the meeting waving a piece of paper: “Dr. Weizmann, it’s a boy!” Balfour announced British policy in a brief letter to Lord Rothschild, a leading British Jew: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the attainment of this object.” The words had been chosen with great care. “National home,” as the British government insisted repeatedly, did not mean a state. Weizmann and other Zionist leaders were equally careful. There was no intention, they said, of creating a Jewish state right away. It might be different, of course, in some distant future, when more Jews had emigrated to Palestine. Few people were convinced, and perhaps it was not expected that they would be. The day after the declaration was made public, The Times’ s headline read, “Palestine for the Jews. Official Sympathy.” From the start, Jews and non-Jews alike, politicians, diplomats and journalists, talked in terms of a Jewish state.15
In the next months, as British forces moved north from Egypt to capture Jerusalem and then the whole of Palestine, what everyone called the Jewish Legion—units of the Royal Fusiliers that had been specially recruited among Jews—went with them. (Vladimir Jabotinsky, the brilliant, abrasive and extremist Russian journalist who had brought the Jewish Legion into existence, marched in its ranks as a second lieutenant.)
When Allenby set up his military administration in Palestine, his first proclamation and all official documents were translated into Hebrew as well as Arabic. In the summer of 1918, with the approval of the British government, the Zionists purchased an estate on a hill in Jerusalem and, in the presence of a crowd that included Allenby and all the senior Allied commanders, Weizmann laid the foundation stones for the Hebrew University. In 1918, too, the British government authorized the dispatch to Palestine of a Zionist commission, headed by Weizmann. Although its instructions were vague—it was to act as a link with the British military administration as well as organizing the local Jews—the commission took on the character of official representative of the Jewish community in Palestine. Moreover, it acted, as British officers sometimes complained, like a government in the making.16
Weizmann himself moved cautiously. He easily resisted pressure from a minority of radicals, including Jabotinsky, who demanded an immediate Jewish state. He maneuvered to ensure that the British or the Americans, not the French, who were too imperialistic and too Catholic, became the mandatory power for Palestine. His task was complicated by divisions and rivalries within Zionism. In an echo of the Peace Conference itself,