Vol. 23 No. 11 · 7 June 2001
pages 7-10 | 4977 words
Balfour, Weizmann and the Creation of Israel
Charles Glass
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate by Tom Segev, translated by Haim Watzman
Little, Brown, 612 pp, £25.00, January 2001, ISBN 0 316 64859 0
- Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine 1917-48 by Naomi Shepherd
Murray, 290 pp, £12.99, September 2000, ISBN 0 7195 6322 4
The British Army occupied Jerusalem on Sunday, 9 December 1917, and withdrew on 14 May 1948. During its brief imperium in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. While nurturing the ‘national home’, a term as deliberately vague as Palestinian ‘autonomy’ is today, Britain neglected to observe the Declaration’s final clause: ‘that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country’.
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Letters
Vol. 23 No. 14 · 19 July 2001
From Norman Cantor
Charles Glass's account of the rise of Zionism (LRB, 7 June) leaves out important parts of the story. In 1938 half the Reform rabbis in the US were not Zionists and some were outspoken anti-Zionists. By 1950 all Reform rabbis in the US supported Zionism, at least in public. What arose in the interval was the need to find a place of refuge for Jews displaced from Eastern and Central Europe and exiled from Arab lands – about a million people in each category. Because there was no such refuge, Zionism moved from a marginal ideology among world Jewry to a central doctrine grounded in necessity and morality. It was Hitler and the nationalist Arab masses, not Balfour, Weizmann or even Ben-Gurion, who created the Israeli state. If the strict quota for Jewish immigration to the US – imposed in 1924 – had been lifted in 1945, instead of 1965, Zionism would not have triumphed. At least 300,000 Israelis now live in the US and at least half of them are highly educated professionals. The elite in Israel send their children to colleges and graduate schools in the US. The Zionist phase in Jewish history is transitory.
Norman Cantor
Hollywood, Florida
From Salah el Serafy
Writing about the rise of Zionism, Charles Glass refers to Lord Cromer as the 'British Viceroy in Egypt'. Cromer (Maurice Baring as he then was) arrived in Egypt in September 1883 and left in May 1907. Throughout this period he was British Agent and Consul-General, not Viceroy. At the time, Egypt had a relationship with the Ottoman Empire, and was ruled by a prince, or khedive. The British went to Egypt to 'defend' him against the Orabi revolt in 1882, stating repeatedly that their presence was temporary. Egypt was never a British colony and the government department dealing with the country was always the Foreign, not the Colonial Office. The situation changed at the start of the First World War, when Britain unilaterally declared Egypt a 'Protectorate'. This arrangement lasted until 1923 when, after much local agitation, Egypt became an independent sovereign state, albeit with some qualifications.
Salah el Serafy
Arlington, Virginia
Vol. 23 No. 16 · 23 August 2001
From J.F. Darycott
Salah el Serafy seems to be uncertain of his Barings (Letters, 19 July). Lord Cromer (1841-1917) was Evelyn Baring and, incidentally, first served in Egypt from 1877 to 1880. Maurice Baring (1874-1945) was his nephew.
J.F. Darycott
Staines, Middlesex
