THE BRITISH GREAT BETRAYAL OF THE JEWS Part 1

THE BRITISH GREAT BETRAYAL OF THE JEWS Part 1

BY

STEPHEN S. WISE AND JACOB DE HAAS

NEW YORK

BRENTANO'S • PUBLISHERS 1930

1930 BY BRENTANO'S, INC .

Printed in the United States of America

by the Stratford Press

To

NATHAN STRAUS

Great Heart, Loyal American Dreamer and Builder of Zion.

This is not a question merely between the Jews and the

Arabs, but a question of British honor.

The Marquis of Reading, former Lord Chief Justice of England

CONTENTS

Introduction xi

CHAPTER

I. The Indictment 3

II. England's First Approach 16

III. Palestine and War Policies 27

IV. England's Original Interpretation 42

V. The Peace Conference 51

VI. The Mandate 79

VII. The Colonial Office Takes Hold 101

VIII. The League Takes Hold 118

IX. The "Crystallization" Process 145

X. We Rest Our Case i 6o

APPENDIX

I. The Great Adventure i6S

II. The Churchill White Paper 173

III. The Mandate for Palestine "i83

ix

X CONTENTS

IV.

V.

A Defense of the Mandate Balfour's Protest

zoo

219

VI. The Home Land Claim 221

VII. The Passfield white Paper 238

VIII. Winston Churchill's Views 286

INTRODUCTION

UPON the issuance of the Passfield White Paper,

October zo, it seemed that, after the tumult and

shouting of protest should die, it would be needful

to set forth the facts lest men forget . The

Passfield Paper was seen at once not to be in slight

or partial variance with an established governmental

policy but an appallingly complete annulment

of what had been assumed by the nations

to have become an unalterable British obligation .

Therefore, whatever else might in the first bitter

hour of accusation and condemnation be said, it

seemed needful to collate and consider the documents

in the case .

Soon after reaching the decision to set forth a

full statement of the facts, I became ill. Forthwith

it became needful to choose between postponing

the plan to publish and sharing the task

with another. I chose the latter course, inviting

Jacob de Haas, comrade and biographer of

Theodor Herzl, to collaborate with me . After

Mr. de Haas' acceptance of the invitation to share

xi

X11

INTRODUCTION

in the preparation of the volume, I became more

seriously ill so that the larger part of the work

had to be done by Mr . de Haas. The major burden

of hurried compilation and preparation of the

material thus rested upon him, though the responsibility

for the book we bear together .

It is a serious, in truth, a grave task to which

we set ourselves, the graver because of a life-long

reverence and affection for all that is English . We

do not indict a people . We do indict a government,

which has rendered a terrible disservice to

its people by bringing their honor into question .

What greater hurt could a government do its

people? The moral betrayals of peace-time are no

less shameful than the military betrayals of wartime.

The aim has been to set forth the case with

fullness and clarity in the following pages . No

need of anticipating the argument in this prefatory

note. Yet it should be said that no deeper

wrong can be done to Britain than to aver, as do

some faint-hearted Jews and some soft-headed

Liberals, that English statesmen designed the Balfour

Declaration to be a bid or lure for world-

Jewish support of the Allied war-aims, which

lure we Jews in our extremity took too seriously .

I am prepared to believe that in the end the

Balfour Declaration came for the most part to

be implemented by Colonial Office bureaucrats

INTRODUCTION

X111

in London and in Palestine, as if the Declaration

were merely a fleeting war measure, to be emptied

of content of ter the Armistice, though not too

suddenly or obviously . But who save an inveterate

foe of Great Britain can believe that Balfour

and Lloyd George and Smuts did no more than

try to trick a people? Passfield and some of his

associates shall not rob us of our faith in the bona

fides of Balfour and his associates .

No more can we assent to the validity of another

theory less cynically urged,-that the War

Cabinet did not encompass the difficulties of a

situation which involved appeasement of Arab

and Jew alike . Two fallacies underlie this theory,

-one, the ascription of lack of intelligence and

understanding to the leaders of the British War

Cabinet. It seems a rather daring hypothesis that

Balfour fumbled in the realm of statecraft, that

this disciplined and far-reaching mentality, to

say nothing of the astute Lloyd George and the

seasoned Smuts, failed to grasp all the factors in

a quite patent situation.

The Balfour Declaration was in the process of

making for nearly two years . Its authorship was

not solitary but collective . It was the work, in a

very real sense, of the Allied War Cabinets and

the American Government. But the attribution

to England's war statesmen of failure to underXiv

INTRODUCTION

stand the competing claims of Jew and Arab

involves a still deeper blunder . There were no

conflicting Arab and Jewish claims in Palestine

during the War, any more than there were conflicting

claims in Iraq or the Hedjaz. The British

War Cabinet framed its policies on different bases

in relation to the two peoples. In return in part

for service rendered and to be rendered by Arab

groups in Syria, Mesopotamia and the Hedjaz,

England undertook to liberate the people of these

lands from Turkish suzernity and to safeguard

their establishment as national entities. That

undertaking, except for French dominance in

Syria, has been fulfilled .

On a wholly different basis, which at the time

seemed to be held with entire sincerity, the

decision was reached to reconstitute the Jewish

National Home. The conception underlying the

Jewish National Home happened to fit into the

deepening faith of the nations that Jews, a minority

people in all countries, needed a national home .

From such a national center in the ancient Jewish

Homeland, it was hoped that healing strength

and inspiration would radiate to Jews everywhere,

and again become an enriching gift to all peoples .

The decision to reconstitute the Jewish National

Home was inevitable in view of the professions of

the Allied Nations that the Great War, beginINTRODUCTION

XV

ning with Serbian resistance to the threat of

Austro-Hungarian domination, was fought to

maintain the national integrity of the smaller

peoples, to reconstitute national entities in so far

as these had been violated, and, above all, to restore

and to safeguard the right of self-determination!

It was on these grounds that the Allied Powers

were impelled to bethink themselves touching the

reconstitution of the Jewish National Home in

Palestine, though nearly two millennia had passed

since the day of exile of the Jewish people . A

further grace was added to the rightful decision

of the Allied Powers, with the eager cooperation

of President Wilson, insofar as the Christian

nations assumed the task of facilitating the establishment

of the Jewish National Home in the

spirit of reparation to a much-wronged people .

Whatever the motivation may have been in

war years that led to the three-fold covenant of

Great Britain, the Jewish people and the nations

today, it is a condition and not a theory that confronts

men . As a result of Britain's pledge to the

Jews and acceptance of the League Mandate, Jews

in all parts of the world,-but, above all, politically

homeless Jews,-uprooted themselves and

took up the march to make a home, a new home,

in the old land. One hundred thousand men and

women, bravest of the brave, have within a decade

Xvi

INTRODUCTION

settled in Palestine in the spirit of pioneers . Unlike

other pioneering settlers, they would not selfishly

hold what they have hardly won, but would share

it with their brothers who are to follow . They

have not pilgrimed in quest of self, nor have they

pioneered for less than the most durable satisfactions

of life that only sacrifice and selflessness can

bestow. Even if there had been no Balfour Declaration

and no League Mandate, it would still be

meet that Britain, our country and other nations

together consider the tragic facts of Jewish homelessness

and hopelessness in many lands and of the

one gleam that shines in Palestine as the land of

a reconstituted home and a reborn hope for the

Jewish people .

Mr. de Haas' almost unique command of the

vast documentary material has made it possible

for us to trace, step by step, the march from the

high promise of November 2, 1917 to the base

breach of October 20, i93o,-the descent from

Balfour to Passfield. It would be unfair not to

state with unmistakable clearness that the Passfield

White Paper was not a bolt from the blue .

It was the culmination of a sinister policy rather

than its commencement . It was more than culmination,

it was canonization . For what Colonial

Office servants had in part planned and long

practiced,-perhaps inevitably, in view of the

INTRODUCTION

Xvii

incongruity of naming Colonial Office administrators

in a Mandated area,-they have at last

attempted to enact into law under Passfield .

I, for my part, am ready to charge the officials

of the Palestine Administration, alike in London

and Jerusalem, with having so bedeviled a situation

as to deepen Arab-Jewish differences, which

at the outset were superficial . Statesmanship with

good-will could easily have composed a situation

which Colonial Office bureaucracy with ill intent

has done everything to confound .

THE GREAT BETRAYAL deals at some

length with the land question, the problem of

Jewish self-help, immigration, and, all to briefly

with the Wailing Wall issue. It must suffice in

summing up to state that the Colonial Office has

objected to Jewish expropriation of Arab land,

widening that term to include lawful and peaceable

acts of purchase at absurdly high rates, plus

provision of substitute lands for the sellers . But,

it should be added, even this "expropriation"

would have been obviated in part, if the Palestine

Government had not utterly failed to fulfill the

terms of the Mandate with respect to the allotment

to Jewish settlers of State Lands and the

encouragement of close settlements.

As for the crime of "Jewish self-help," it has

been the finest distinction of the Jewish resettleXviii

INTRODUCTION

ment. That it may be understood, one need but

consider the abhorrent alternative, namely that

the plowing, sowing and reaping be done not by

Jewish owners and settlers but by hired Arab

workers. Then in truth it might have been

charged that the Jews in Palestine are ready to

reap, but are unwilling to sow, as tillers of the soil

must be willing. Jewish self-help is only another

way of saying that the Jewish settlers felt and

feel that by their own toil their land must be

redeemed. How they have toiled from the earliest

to the latest groups of pioneers is the glory of

the tale of Jewish resettlements in Palestine . It is

Jewish self-help, not Arab exploitation, that has

redeemed the land . The only wrong perpetrated

by Jewish self-help,-which has not shut out the

employment of thousands of Arab workers,-has

been to move the enslaved Arab Fellahin to revolt

against the bondage thrust upon them by rapacious

Arab Effendis .

As for immigration, no one can dispute that it

must depend on the "economic absorptive capacity

of the land ." But is it necessary to point out

that such capacity began with Jewish immigration?

It will end when Jewish immigration is

barred . Whatever Arab unemployment obtains is

not a sequel to Jewish immigration, but largely a

"throw-back" to incurable Arab nomadism and

INTRODUCTION

XiX

its four-seasonable non-employment . Jewish immigration

of Palestine gave economic status to the

Arab. Its continuance is the only guarantee of

continued Arab employment and the enhancement

of the welfare of all the people . To set up a

dichotomy between Jewish immigration and Arab

employment is to contradict all the facts in the

case.

No point more clearly illustrates the political

and moral shortcomings of the Palestine administration,

culminating in the Passfield White

Paper, than the development of the Wailing Wall

issue. This has been handled in such fashion as to

deny the Jew his right to worship undisturbed

and unchallenged at this one remaining Jewish

Shrine. At the same time, groups of Islam adventurers

were lured into the hope of making it

exclusively what has never before been claimed

for it, a super-shrine of Islam . The Wailing Wall

of twenty centuries of Jewish suffering, suffering

transfigured by an undying hope, is to be converted

into a memorial of the fancied resting

place of the imaginary steed, Burak, of a dreampilgrimage.

That the Wailing Wall issue is before

a League of Nations Commission today, is symptomatic

of a situation needlessly aggravated . The

Arabs have been given every reason to believe that

whatever the Balfour Declaration and the ManXX

INTRODUCTION

date might say, Anglo-Palestine officials would so

manage affairs as to make orderly, progressive,

continuous Jewish resettlement all but impossible .

At the same time, Arab agitators have in every

way been led to the hope either of directly repealing

the Mandate or of undoing it by such processes

of indirection as would bring frustration to

the Jewish effort .

If the Colonial Office sought to conform to the

tenor as well as the text of the Mandate, then it

has suffered itself to be overborne at last by its

underlings in Palestine and their confederates in

London. As for Lord Passfield's White Paper, it

has crystallized and even petrified the refusal of

Anglo-Palestine officials honorably and fully to

discharge the obligations of the Mandate . Until

canceled in substance, this will remain a blot

upon England. The wisdom and justness of rewarding

the Arab massacres of August 1929 by

the unconditional Passfield surrender of October,

1930, will ultimately be left for decision not to

the pundits of the Colonial Office, but to the conscience

of the English people, irrespective of political

parties.

In December, 1918, as one of a Commission of

the Zionist Organization of America, the writer

discussed with Mr. Balfour at some length the

implications of the Declaration bearing his name,

INTRODUCTION

XXl

as these were about to be considered by the Paris

Peace Conference . It fell to him to acquaint Mr .

Balfour with the text of a resolution adopted the

preceding day by the American Jewish Congress

in Philadelphia assembled . This resolution, expressive

of the overwhelming will of American Israel,

besought the British Government to assume a

Protectorate over Palestine . Mr. Balfour replied

that it was a great honor to his government and

people to be urged by one of the populous and

powerful Jewries in the world to assume a trusteeship

over a Jewish Palestine . He added that he

hoped, as he believed, that it was within the purpose

of President Wilson to accept for the United

States a parallel trusteeship over a reconstituted

Christian Armenia .

Subsequently Great Britain accepted a Mandate

from the League of Nations to fulfill the purpose

of the Balfour Declaration . This purpose has

not been fulfilled . The White Paper of Lord Passfield

is a betrayal,-it may be that one should

name it the climax and culmination of a great

betrayal. Israel's, indeed mankind's, appeal is from

the White Paper of Passfield to the conscience and

honor of Balfour's England.

New York City

STEPHEN S . WISE.

November, 1930

THE

GREAT BETRAYAL

I

THE INDICTMENT

„ IF THERE is no departure in the policy it is very

remarkable that the whole Jewish world should

take exception to the British statement," retorted

David Lloyd George to Premier Ramsay Mac-

Donald, across the floor of the House of Commons

on Wednesday, October 29, 1930 .

The policy relates to the upbuilding of the

Jewish National Home, as redefined in an eagerly

looked for report on the future of Palestine prepared

by Sir John Hope Simpson, and enveloped

in a White Paper issued by the British Government

on October 20, 1930. There is no question that

Lord Passfield is responsible for this unique document.

It has the authority of the Colonial Office

over which he presides, and we assume, despite the

press reports that the Cabinet members either

never saw it, or opposed it, that the government is

responsible for a document which sets forth a

government policy. A British White Paper has

turned the Jewish World black with mourning .

From October 21st, the Jewish world has been

3

4

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

shaken by a surging wave of emotion, an aroused

and embittered sense of wrath, that surpasses in its

broad sweep, its intensity and its reality everything

heretofore experienced in Jewish Life in

our generation .

We Jews-and the writers speak as two Jews

who stood at the cradle of the modern political

Zionist movement who all their lives have participated

in as well as observed the movement of

Jewish affairs here in America and elsewhere,-we

Jews are in truth capable of protest . We have

suffered so many of the "slings and arrows of outrageous

fortune," we have experienced so many

indignities, we have had heaped upon us so much

of the world's contumely, that our appeals to the

conscience of mankind have something of the

quality of oft-repeated prayers . Yet it can be said

with assurance and knowledge that neither the

Drey f us affair, nor the Kishinef massacre, nor

the demand for the abrogation of the United

States Treaty with Russia-three epochal events

in modern Jewish history,-stirred the same vehemence,

or witnessed the instant ingathering of

the mass of Jews that is now exhibited in every

city and town in the world . A race, which in all

the normal aspects of life is as much divided as

any other people, has as though by a magnetic

attraction been drawn together in response to

THE INDICTMENT

5

Lord Passfield's White Paper and has forged a

union of unlooked for strength .

Why?

Every Jew is not a Zionist . Not every Zionist is

prepared to settle in Palestine . There are non-

Zionists, even anti-Zionists, among us . Yet on

every Jewish lips there has formed not only that

hateful, poisonous word "betrayal" but the word

is uttered with a burning sense of indignation .

This people does not claim to be without guile .

Having grown old in suffering, it is self-disciplined

even in the language of imprecation .

Zionism is in danger . The Jew, thinks the non-

Jew, moved by racial urge yields to an irridenta

over which it is pleasant to sentimentalize . The

Jew, thinks the observer, saw himself reacting to

the pleasure of possessing a "place in the sun" and

he is hysterical because he finds himself lost in the

shadows. Perhaps there is a gleam of truth in

these suggestions . But a much larger measure of

truth rests in the fact that the Jew feels that he

has been duped as well as betrayed . He has suffered

a violation not only with respect to Zion and his

rights in Palestine, but he has sustained the blow

at the hands of the British government-a government

in which, as shall presently be made clear,

he had complete faith . He has been outraged by,

of all British governments, a Labor Government

6

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

which, owing to the complexities of the Jewish

proletariat in every country, spelled to the average

Jewish mind the party of hope, of redemption and

justice, and of that equalization of humanity

which is the necessary back-bone of the Jewish

concept of reasonable existence . Moreover to add

to the intensity of the mortification it was assumed

to within a few months, that a Labor Government

presided over by Ramsay MacDonald, who

had said pleasant things of the Jews in Palestine,

would of all human forces best appreciate the

nature of the sacrifice and the character of the

effort being made by the Jewish people in Palestine.

Is our sense of wrong suffered-hysteria? The

voices that answer for us are the voices of the

former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, former

Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain and

former Colonial Secretary Leopold S. Amery :

"What we regret is that his Majesty's Government

would appear to have abandoned

that policy-they have discouraged the effort

of the Jewish leaders to promote the good feeling

which the government itself postulates as a

necessary condition of the settlement of Palestinian

problems .

"Without giving either Jewish or Arab

THE INDICTMENT

7

opinion an opportunity to express itself or allowing

the voice of the British Parliament to be

heard, they have laid down a policy of so

definitely negative a character that it appears

to us to conflict not only with the insistence of

the Council of the League of Nations that it

would be contrary to the intention of the

mandate if the Jewish National Home were

crystallized at its present stage of development

but with the whole spirit of the Balfour

Declaration and of the statements made by

successive governments in the last twelve

years."

The "man in the street," a trifle perplexed and

not a little suspicious as to the ways of politicians,

suspects that perhaps this is only one of the

peculiar methods by which the "outs" in England

seek to overcome the "ins ." So in substantiation

of the Baldwin, Chamberlain, Amery view

we quote the words of General Jan Christian

Smuts who, though one of the foremost statesmen

in the British dominions, is at present without

office in his own country, South Africa, and is

therefore far removed from the play and counterplay

that proceed in Westminster.

"As one of those who was responsible for

the Balfour Declaration I feel deeply perturbed

8

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

over the present Palestine policy . The government

statement marks a retreat from that

Declaration which was a definite promise to

the Jew of the world that the policy of the

Jewish National Home would be actively

prosecuted and its intention was to obtain the

powerful Jewish influence for the Allied cause

at the darkest hour of the War.

"As such it was approved by the United

States Government and the other Allies and accepted

in good faith by the Jews . It cannot now

be varied unilaterally by the British Government.

It represents a debt of honor which must

be discharged in full at all cost. The circumstances

of the original Declaration were far too

solemn to permit any wavering now. I most

strongly urge the government to issue a statement

that the terms of the Balfour Declaration

be fully carried out in good faith and the

government's Palestine policy be recast accordi.

ng„ly

The English conservative leaders accuse the

Government of having "abandoned" a policy.

General Smuts describes it as a "retreat ." The

connotation of these two words as applied to

the act is the same, the difference is as to what

may subsequently follow. Smuts is sanguine that

THE INDICTMENT

9

the lost ground can be recovered . Baldwin is

more pessimistic . Both emphasize a radical

change: both admit a breach of faith.

These men accuse not the people, but the present

government of Great Britain of disloyalty to

principle and of betrayal of policy . Jews voice

the same sense of outrage. They formally employ

toward the British government's action the words

Sir Edward Grey used to describe Germany's

violation in 1914 of the treaty which neutralized

Belgium.

"Contrary to the assurances given by the

representative of the British Government to

the League of Nations, a statement has been

issued by that Government announcing a

Policy with respect to Palestine which is a

breach of its trust and a defiance of its international

obligations.

"To this repudiation and violation, the Jewish

People will never submit.

"We denounce as utterly unfounded the

suggestion that Jewish development in Palestine

has been prejudicial to the welfare of the

Arabs. The contrary is the truth. Improvement

in Arab life, as the proceedings before

the Mandates Commission have conclusively

proven, steadily followed in the wake of Jewish

effort.

10 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

"We declare the professed adhesion of the

statement of the British Government to the

Jewish National Home policy simultaneously

with a denial of the right of immigration and

land purchase by Jews as a travesty of that

policy and as a violation of the Declaration by

a previous Government in 1922, that the Jews

are in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance.

"We point to the fact that the Palestine

Mandate, which embodies the Balf our Declaration,

is based upon the explicit recognition of

`the historic connection of the Jewish people

with Palestine .' We declare this connection unbroken

and unbreakable. This connection will

subsist despite the present attempt of the

British Government to nullify the Palestine

Mandate and to reduce the Balfour Declaration

to a scrap of paper."

So declared three thousand Jews, hastily

gathered, filling to capacity Mecca Temple, New

York City on October 21st. Here, says the critic,

speaks the carping, easily-roused mob! Perfervid

Zionists with something at stake, if no more than

pride in party and in theory, are shouting . Note

then that the preceding words quoted from the

mass-meeting resolution are an under-statement

THE INDICTMENT

II

compared with what two men of affairs, a banker

and an industrialist, men of cautious phraseology,

subduers of public emotion say . Mr. Felix M.

Warburg, better known as a banker and philanthropist

than as exponent of a racial urge, in

a long message explaining his resignation from

the office of chairman of the Administrative

Committee of the Jewish Agency says :

"The assurances which Lord Passfield gave

me as to the forthcoming recommendations,

are at variance with what he has now publicly

announced.

"At Lord Passfield's personal invitation, I

went to London on August 22nd . During a

two hours' talk, he authorized us to make certain

statements to the Administrative Committee

of the Jewish Agency at its forthcoming

executive meeting in Berlin a few days later .

In the light of the documents just issued by

Lord Passfield, I am compelled, however regretfully,

to say that I was misled . Lord Passfield's

representations to me made me the

innocent vehicle of misstatements to my colleagues

of the Jewish Agency .

"With deep regret I must resign as Chairman

of the Administrative Committee . I had

a right to place complete reliance upon the

12 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

statements made by Lord Passfield on behalf

of his Government and through me the Jewish

people were misled. Further relations such as

the Chairmanship of the Administrative Committee

entails, are no longer possible."

Simultaneously and with no less vehemence

Lord Melchett, the former Sir Alfred Mond,

chemist and financier, a British Peer, conveys his

flaming sense of wrong.

"This grotesque travesty is an insult to the

intelligence of Jewry and an affront to the

Mandates Commission . It is impossible to discover

what rights the Jews in or out of Palestine

are to have in the future, or in what way

they can be made to feel they have any rights

at all in that country."

Are these men mad? Are they turning to the

invective of Isaiah because the frenzy of Zion

has gotten into their bones? Or have they for

private reasons set out to blast the honor of Mac-

Donald, or to destroy the reputation of Lord

Passfield? Is the conservative Baldwin seeking to

ditch his political opponent? Is Smuts thrusting

at anti-imperialistic Passfield? Is capitalist Warburg

aiming at the overturning of a socialistic

government? Is Melchett seeking revenge on

trade unionists? Let us complete the variety of

THE INDICTMENT

13

the accusations by adding that of Abraham

Cahan, veteran socialist, and seventy year old

editor of the leading Yiddish socialist daily in the

United States, The Forward :

"With a bleeding heart I must ask : How

can a Labor Party issue such a policy?

"In the present tragedy of England our

comrades there have, it seems, lost their ordinary

coolness, common sense and deep Socialist

sense of justice. They believe that the

decision which they have made is in the interests

of their country, of their people. We,

the Jewish Socialists, can only have one standpoint

in this sad moment . We must stand by

our people, the Jewish people .

"We demand our rights in Palestine . We demand

that England should keep its word and

not break its solemn vow . . . .

"Let us hope that the League of Nations will

reject the decision of the Colonial Office and

demand of England that it fulfill its contract ."

There was more of individual drama in Zola's

J'Accuse hurled at President Faure and the

French General Staff, when the Dreyfus case

reached its culmination than in any of these individual

statements. But the accumulation of

protest before us, beyond listing and overwhelm14

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

14 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

ing in its spontaneity, indicates that a world has

risen, a world, that includes men of British birth,

against a °`White Paper" of which the venerable

Baron Edmond de Rothschild has written-

"the principles laid down in that paper are

contrary both to the spirit and the letter of

the Mandate for Palestine, which is based on

the Declaration made by Lord Balfour, then

Secretary of Foreign Affairs in the name of his

government ."

Against this charge Mr. MacDonald in the

House of Commons on October 28th, sought to

answer all critics by saying :

"In the spirit of the mandate and sticking

strictly to the letter of the mandate, we are

straightening out the differences between contradictory

parts of certain declarations . Nothing

has amazed me more than the extraordinary

intentions attributed to the Colonial

Office and the government on account of this

White Paper ."

This obtuseness is also characteristic of Mac-

Donald's answer to General Smuts, in which he

says :

"The Balfour Declaration explicitly provided

that nothing should be done to prejudice

the civil and religious rights of the existing

THE INDICTMENT

15

non-Jewish communities in Palestine . Since

the acceptance of the Palestine Mandate the

trend of events, particularly in some methods

adopted in the establishment of the Jewish National

Home, has tendered to endanger the

position of the non-Jewish communities to a

degree which, in light of the Simpson report,

has given us great concern and has convinced

us of the necessity for special measures to ensure

that the double obligation of the Mandate

be fulfilled."

Setting aside motive, restraining emotion in

order to put the case before the bar of public

opinion, the question remains, has the Labor Government

reversed the Balfour Declaration and

Palestine Mandatory policy? And if the Government

of that people, which assumed "the white

man's burden," has been guilty of a breach of

sacred trust and of public faith, what is the measure

of that breach? What, if anything lies behind

it? How deep is the moral delinquency, how great

the legal violation of contractual obligations?

To answer all these questions we must carry

the reader back over thirty years of public

Jewish effort to achieve a foothold in Zion, in

loyal cooperation with the government of Great

Britain.

11

ENGLAND'S FIRST APPROACH

ON JULY 9, 19o2,Theodor Herzl, protagonist

of the "Jewish State : An Attempt at a Solution

of the Jewish Problem," and President of the

World Zionist Organization, appeared in London

as an expert before the Royal Commission on

Alien Immigration, over which Lord James of

Hereford presided . The ,great founder of the

modern Zionist movement did not hesitate to

speak into the British record his clear conviction

as to the causes as well as the solution of the Jewish

Question. He defined his objective thus :

"The solution of the Jewish difficulty is the

recognition of Jews as a people and the finding

by them of a legally recognized home, to

which Jews in those parts of the world in

which they are oppressed would naturally migrate,

for they would arrive there as citizens

just because they are Jews, and not as aliens .

. . . Give to Jews there their rightful position

as a people and I am convinced they would de-

16

FIRST APPROACH

1 7

velop a distinct Jewish cult-national characteristics

and national aspirations-which

would make for the progress of mankind."

Herzl in his statement transposed the phrase

Jewish National Home, into "a home legally recognized

as Jewish," in order to achieve clarity .*

Whatever the subsequent course of events,

whatever the nature of the interruptions that

followed, it is clear from these words of the

founder of the Zionist movement, uttered before

a Parliamentary body, that British statesmen and

British officialdom had in their possession in

documentary form, as early as 19o2, definite information

as to the objects of Zionism, and the

aims and purposes of the movement. There ought

therefore in 1930 arise neither bewilderment nor

astonishment as to Zionist claims. Nor did Theodor

Herzl in i9o2 as an individual go beyond

the avowed program adopted publicly at the first

Zionist Congress, held at Basle, Switzerland in

1897, which thereafter became known as the

Basle Program .

"Zionism aims to create a publicly secured,

legally assured home for the Jewish people in

Palestine."

* Theodor Herzl, Jacob de Haas, Vol . II, p . 323 .

i8 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

These Jewish aspirations were in themselves not

new to Englishmen nor to British statesmen .

Sokolow's two volumes on the History of Zionism,

are in the main devoted to collating the facts

of the British interest in the Restoration of the

Jews to Palestine from Cromwellian Days . Setting

aside emotional, religious and mystical

interest in the fulfillment of prophecy, it is important

to point out that from Moses Montefiore's

first visit to Palestine in 18 3 6, and more

especially from the date of his intervention in

the Damascus incident of 11840, there developed

in England a political practice of exercising protection

over the Jews in the Orient, which

thoroughly warranted the assumption by Jews

of the belief that Bible-loving England was

fundamentally the power that would second any

effort at Jewish restoration . Moreover it is beyond

cavil that Lord Shaftesbury, Col . Gawler,

Lord Kitchener, Sir Charles Warren, Sir Charles

Wilson, Benjamin Disraeli, Col . Conder, Laurence

Oliphant and a host of others in different

ways and at different times, from the Crimean

War to 1912 provoked the issue, or deliberately

took the initiative in urging the Jewish resettlement

as a practical political measure . Herzl in

1902 was mild and circumspect compared to Earl

Shaftesbury in 1875

FIRST APPROACH

19

Let us not delay . . . to send out the best

agents . . . to search the length and breadth

of Palestine to survey the land, and if possible to

go over every corner of it, drain it, measure it,

and, if you will, prepare it for the return of its

ancient possessors. . . . I recollect speaking, to

Lord Aberdeen, when he was Prime Minister, on

the subject of the Holy Land : and he said to me,

"If the Holy Land should pass out of the hands

of the Turks, into whose hands should it f all?"

Why, the reply was ready, "Not into the hands

of other powers, but let it return into the hands

of the Israelites ."

And no Zionist has ventured to say, "Of the

modern contribution of the Jewish Palestinian

life" what the Chief Surgeon to George V wrote

in i9i2.t

"The passerby may ask, in the words of the

Book of Nehemiah, `What do these feeble

Jews? Will they revive the stones out of the

heaps of the rubbish?' And the answer is that

among the heaps of rubbish, among the piledup

ruins of long ages, among the wreckage

left by war, earthquake and fire, there are

some who can still see the glow of light on the

* Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Report, 1875, p . I IS .

t The Land That Is Desolate, an account of a tour in Palestine by Sir

Frederick Treves, Bart ., London, x913, p. x16.

20 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

stones that mark the spot where the Ark of

the Lord had stood."

It therefore seemed natural enough that Herzl's

spiritual personality, impressive stature and simple

suggestion of a wise and humane policy on

the Jewish question should have met with almost

instant response on the part of the British government.

The result of negotiations was that on

August 14, 1903, the Foreign Office, cooperating

with the Colonial Office over which Joseph

Chamberlain presided, issued to Herzl and the

Zionist Congress, then assembled in Basle, an offer

of a grant of land in East Africa . The scheme involved

:

The appointment of a Jewish official as the

chief of the local administration, and permission

to the colony to have a free hand in regard

to municipal legislation as to the management

of religious and purely domestic

matters, such local autonomy being conditional

upon the right of his Majesty's government

to exercise general control.

East Africa is not Palestine . But the general

theory underlying the peculiar Jewish need and

the national aspiration involved in any Zionist

conception is written plain in this document . If

British bureaucracy is bemused, it is not for lack

FIRST APPROACH

21

of information in its departmental files, nor is it

due to confusion provoked by changes of attitude

on the part of Jews. The Zionists have held steadfast

to principle since its formulation in the Basle

Program.

As to Palestine and its local conditions, it is only

fair to say that British officialdom knew more

about Arab social, economic, agricultural and all

other problems than the Jews aspiring to settle

there. From the first attempt of the American

scholar, Robinson,* in 1837-9 to explore the

archeological remains in Palestine in the interest

of Biblical research, the British have, through the

Palestine Exploration Fund, concentrated upon

the study of everything however minute that

relates to Palestine . Theirs are the surveys, the

compilation of flora and fauna, theirs too the

enumeration and localization of the Bedouin

tribes; theirs the studies in local conditions, the

compilation of customs and excise, estimates of

population, speculation as to origins of peoples,

observations on everything that relates to the

area between the River of Egypt and the cedars

of Lebanon.

Those prone to speculate upon such matters

might detect in the volume of British expert

material on Palestine compiled since Lord Pal-

* Biblical Researches in Palestine, 3 Vo1s ., x841 .

22 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

merston's first consideration, in the forties, of

the possibility of exercising a British protectorate

over Palestine in the Jewish interest, the slow

hatching of a political plot. We for our part

repudiate all such suggestions . We merely cite

the existence of the great volume of material beginning

with Bownring's report on Syria in 118 3 8,

the hundreds of reports, documents and British

travel books written from that date to the beginning

of the World War, as proof to the detached

reader of what is patent to us, that the

British government had at its disposal, at every

stage of its association with Jews in the matter

of Palestine, if anything a superabundance of

data. The psychological as well as the physical

problems of Palestine have been fairly stationary

since i 902 when the British Cabinet eagerly considered

Herzl's proposals . Nothing has transpired

in Palestine since the World War which could

not be easily foreseen. The new factors, Arab

and Jewish immigration with the attendant economic

changes that followed, were part of a

policy specifically advanced by the British government,

and even the Arab protests to Jewish

claims, as we shall presently make clear, were all

part of the conscious knowledge of statesmen

who advocated the creation of the Jewish National

Home and the obtaining for England of

FIRST APPROACH

23

the Mandate for Palestine, on the express condition

that it should be her duty to facilitate the

establishment and development of that Home.

But we resume our narrative . In 19o5 the

British East African offer was rejected by the

Zionists. After Theodor Herzl's death, a period

of non-political effort, of patient colonization

effort, followed . The Zionists changed not an iota

of their aspirations which could not be realized in

organized fashion in view of the seeming incapacity

of the then Ottoman Government for

a proper comprehension of Zionist plans and for

stability of dealing with the leaders of the movement.

The Zionists therefore promoted agricultural

settlements and the use of Hebrew as a living

language. Government reports noted the

increase of Jewish population, the development

of vineyards and orange groves and the restrictions

practiced by the Turkish government, thus

emphasizing the inwardness of the movement and

the gradual changes in conditions in Palestine .

Yildiz Kiosk for international political reasons

was resisting the Jewish advance . Coming under

the pressure of the German Drang nach Osten,

it dreaded most that alienation of German military

support which alone could maintain the

Ottoman Empire as against ever-threatening

Russian advance. In the fear, finally, of the Rus24

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

sian political machination whereby every Russian

Jew, however persecuted at home, was yet

claimed in Palestine as a Russian subject, it issued

"red passports" to Jews which limited their stay

in the country, and employing many other

methods to hamper Jewish effort.

When Abdul Hamid was dethroned the

Young Turk Party deliberately announced in

i9o9 that they closed the doors on Zionist political

aspirations in Palestine. The new leaders

sought to Mohammedanize all the peoples in the

Turkish Empire and would not welcome more

Jews. This clash reveals both the steadfastness

of the Jewish effort and the means available even

to the most stupid bureaucrat of ascertaining the

Jewish attitude . If there has been sinning-it has

been sinning in the light .

Zionist fortunes were at a low ebb at the outbreak

of the war .* To save what had been created

in Palestine was the leading thought of those

sanguine spirits hoping for better times . The

world Zionist organization in the fall of 1914

naturally fell asunder, redividing its various associations

into their original national groupings .

The central office was in Berlin-the least

numerically significant group of Zionist was in

England. It was only in America, that by virtue

* For fuller details see Louis D. Brandeis by Jacob de Haas, pp . 56-98 .

FIRST APPROACH

25

of oceanic separation as well as political neutrality,

careful consideration could be given to what

might be the aftermath of the war . But all such

contemplation of the future was for a time

rudely disturbed not only by pressing Jewish

distress in the war lands but by the fact that the

war alliances ran counter to every conceivable

emotion stirring among Jews .

To side with England was natural enough to

the overwhelming majority, but by siding with

England to support Russia, whose every advance

spelled devastation and horror to the Jews, seemed

impossible. The Germans took ample advantage

of this political misalliance both in Poland and

in the United States . Without promise or specific

prospect, but with an abiding faith in English

honor, English justice and the inherent British

pro-Jewish interest in Palestine, the attempt was

made by lovers of England to win Jewish support

for British arms and the Allied cause . Those

who aroused this pro-Jewish sentiment including

the authors acted under a moral urge . They

vigorously pressed upon their fellow Jews what

they regarded, in the circumstances, as rightmindedness.

The British Cabinet, as post war

documents make abundantly clear, regarded

Jewish support of the allies as of great importance

. Before, therefore, any Zionist approach

26 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

was made to the British Government, partly on

their own volition, partly instigated by non-

Zionist English Jews who sought to rally support

for their country, the leaders gave Zionists careful

consideration to the method of winning Jewish

aid.

III

PALESTINE AND WAR POLICIES

WE UNDERSCORE the fact that the first formal

presentation of the Zionist case to the British

Government was made in October, 1916, and

that the consecutive pourparlers that led to the

Balfour Declaration began February 2, 1917.

The British Government in its clear understanding

of the Jewish interest in the creation of the

Jewish Homeland in Palestine anticipated the

Zionists . Lord Asquith in his "Memoirs" relates

that in December, 1914, Sir Herbert Samuel suggested

to him what the Premier regarded as a

wild project for Palestine .

The next two important British steps are reported

in the documents which the Soviet Government

has published . Therein appears both the

British view of the need of Jewish support together

with the British official understanding of

what kind of a promise regarding Palestine would

arouse the Jews . This is not an argument between

Jews and British statesmen but a cold blooded

27

28 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

28 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

political discussion between the British Cabinet

and the existing Russian Government .

In "A Memorandum * of the British Embassy

in Petrograd to the Minister for Foreign Affairs,

S. D. Sazonoff," dated March 13, 1919x6 and found

in the archives of the Russian Foreign Office, we

read :

."A Telegram' has been received from Sir

Edward Grey, to the effect that the question of

settling Jews in Palestine has been brought to

the notice of His Majesty's Government . Although,

as is known, many Jews are rather indifferent

to the Zionist idea, a very great and

most influential part of Jewry in all countries

would greatly appreciate the proposal of an

agreement relating to Palestine, which would

satisfy the aspirations of the Jews .

" `If the above view is correct, it is clear

that by utilizing the Zionist idea, important

political results could be achieved . One of the

results would be the conversion of the Jewish

elements in the East, the United States of

America, and other places to the use of the

Allies ; elements whose attitude is at present

rather antagonistic to the Allies .'

"The British Government, as is known, put

* Zionism, Leonard Stein . PP . 138 - 140 .

WAR POLICIES

29

the question before representative Jews of the

various sections of English Jewry, asking for

their opinion on the question . The Memorandum

quotes one of the very moderate replies

received from Dr. Lucien Wolf .

""If, as a result of the War, Palestine will

come into the sphere of the interests of France

and Great Britain, the French and British

Governments will not fail to take into consideration

the historic interests of Jewry in that

country. Both Governments will secure for the

Jewish population equal political, civil and religious

rights with the other inhabitants,

municipal rights in the colonies and towns

which may appear necessary, as well as reasonable

facilities for colonization and immigration.

"'The only aim of His Majesty's Government

is to find some agreement which would

prove an inducement to the majority of Jews

and would facilitate the conclusion of an

agreement to secure Jewish support . Having

this view in consideration, His Majesty's Government

is of the opinion that a project which

would grant the Jews,-when the colonists in

Palestine have attained a position which will

enable them to rival the Arabs in strength,-

the administration of their own internal affairs

30 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

in that country (with the exception of

Jerusalem and the Holy Places) ,-such an

agreement would be a greater inducement for

the majority of Jews . His Majesty's Government

does not wish to give any preference to

any one form of the solutions of this problem .

It is well aware, however, that an international

Protectorate would meet the opposition on the

part of influential Jewish sections .

"'In telegraphically communicating the

above, Sir Edward Grey instructs Sir George

Buchanan to request the Russian Government

to give the question their immediate serious

consideration and to ask them to communicate

their point of view."'

We will not further labor the fact that the War

Cabinet, actuated by high British needs were,

however, acting with great circumspection . They

no doubt knew then, of the existence of preliminary

drafts of the Sykes-Picot Treaty, which

agreed to a division of the Near East in accordance

with the imperialistic pretensions of the

Allied Powers. Nevertheless, in April, 1917, the

British War Department issued the following

statement on the War aims in the Near East :

"It is proposed that the following be adopted

as the heads of a scheme for a Jewish re-settleWAR

POLICIES

3 1

ment of Palestine in accordance with Jewish

National Aspiration :

i . Basis of Settlement

Recognition of Palestine as the Jewish National

Home.

z. Status of Jewish Population in Palestine

Generally

The Jewish population present and future

throughout Palestine is to possess and

enjoy full national, political and civic

rights .

3. Immigration into Palestine

The Suzerain Government shall grant full

and free rights of immigration into Palestine

to Jews of all countries .

4. The Establishment of a Chartered Company

The Suzerain Government shall grant a

Charter to a Jewish Company for the

colonization and development of Palestine,

the Company to have power to acquire and

take over any concessions for works of a

public character, which may have been or

may hereafter be granted by the Suzerain

Government and the rights of preemption

of Crown lands or other lands not held in

32 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

private or religious ownership and such

other powers and privileges as are usual in

Charters or Statutes of similar colonizing

bodies.

f . Communal Autonomy

Full autonomy is to be enjoyed by Jewish

communities throughout Palestine in all

matters bearing upon their education, religious

or communal welfare."

These detailed statements each word of which

at this juncture is well worth pondering over,

were simultaneously reduced by the Allied War

propagandists to five succinct sentences, so all

who run might read what England proposed .

"Palestine is to be recognized as the Jewish

National Home. Jews of all countries to be

accorded full liberty of immigration . Jews to

enjoy full national, political and civic rights

according to their place of residence in Palestine.

"A Charter to be granted to a Jewish Company

for the developments of Palestine .

"The Hebrew language to be recognized as

the official language of the Jewish province ."

The foregoing was the public bait British

officialdom dangled before Jewish eyes . SimulWAR

POLICIES

33

taneously the Allied Powers were pursuing three

policies in the Near East. The pro-Arab Mac-

Mahon arrangement which according to all

authorities excluded Palestine ; the division of the

Syrian littoral between France and England and

the establishment in the Southern area, wherein

Great Britain was to exercise suzerainty, of the

Jewish National Home . There could be no doubt

that the question of Palestine as the Jewish Homeland

and as Holy land to three faiths was receiving

meticulous consideration. This was so in

part because the War had come to revolve around

the question of the rights of all the lesser nationalities

of Europe. In English and American

political circles particularly, both Armenia and

Palestine were grouped with Poland, Serbia and

Belgium as lands of which the rightful peoples

were, wholly or in part, long dispossessed. Their

reconstitution became central to the war aims of

the Allied Powers.

Therefore a detailed record of the progress of

events that culminated in the issuance of the Balfour

Declaration on November 2, 1917 is of vast

importance. Their mere itemization cannot fail

to impress the impartial reader with the truth

that despite the exigencies of war the British

Cabinet proceeded with great care . England in

every respect was preparing, in the language of

34 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

the "Research Committee of the Geneva Office,

League of Nations Association," to issue a "tremendous,

though carefully guarded statement"

epitomizing "in one sentence long deferred hopes

among one people and the impassioned fears of

another."

On May 24, 1917 the London Times published

an impressive protest on behalf of Conjoint

Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies of

British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association .

These anti-Zionists set forth all their objections

to the Zionist theory and particularly to the

Chartered Company project suggested in the war

aims statement . This protest was further supported

by a galaxy of names, great in Anglo-

Jewry on May 29, 1917, yet on June 4, 1917 the

French Government, through M . Cambon formally

committed itself to :

The renaissance of the Jewish nationality in

that Land from which the people of Israel

were exiled so many centuries ago.

The French government, which entered this

present war to defend a people wrongfully

attacked . . . can but feel sympathy for your

cause, the triumph of which is bound up with

that of the Allies .

By that date, at the suggestion of the British

WAR POLICIES

35

authorities Mr . Sokolow had conferred with the

Vatican on the Holy Places, and with the Italian

Prime Minister and each achievement was cabled

to Zionist Organizations over British controlled

cables, and delivered by British War Office officials.

In April 1917, the United States entered the

war and upon the occasion of the visit to the

United States of Arthur James Balfour, the

Zionist program was discussed with President

Wilson who as early as 1911 and repeatedly

thereafter had made known his profound interest

in the Zionist idea . The field of international

discussion was accordingly widened and

all the drafts of the proposed declaration were

submitted for approval to the White House .

So far we have traced the independent acts of

the British Government. A brief sketch of the

Zionist effort towards the culmination is in

place. Until well into 19 15, the Zionists in England

were content to make propaganda for the

cause, which as we have seen naturally linked

with British victory . At the end of z915 a group

was organized in London to sketch a program,

that should serve as a foundation for the official

representations which were then in view .

In October i 9 i 6, the English Zionist leaders

submitted to the British government a formal

36 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

"program for a new administration of Palestine

and for a Jewish resettlement of Palestine in accordance

with the aspirations of the Zionist

Movement." This program included the "recognition

of a separate Jewish nationality or national

unit in Palestine" and "the establishment of a

Jewish chartered company ."

"The 7th of February 1917 constitutes a

turning-point in history. . . . Sir Mark Sykes,

Bart M.P., had communicated with Dr . Weizmann

and the author on the question of the

treatment of the Zionist problem," writes Mr .

Sokolow.* Sir Mark, in conjunction with a representative

of the French Government, M.

Georges Picot-the joint authors of the famous

Sykes-Picot agreement of May i9i6,-conferred

with Dr. Moses Gaster and on February 7th, in

Dr. Gaster's home in London, the first round

table conference between these two officials and

a group of Zionists which included Sir Herbert

Samuel took place.

The full minutes of this and subsequent sessions

were transmitted to the American Zionist

Organization by officials of the British War

Office. Britain was not romantically undertaking

to reward the discoverer of a formula of acetone,

in accordance with his heart's desire, by giving

* Zionism, Vol. II, P. 5 z .

WAR POLICIES

37

him or his people, Palestine . Practical issues were

uppermost in all men's thoughts . The memorandum

presented by the Zionists just prior to the

discussion of the final stages of the negotiations

urged that after three years of discussion :

The problem be considered in the light of

imperial interests and the principles for which

the Entente stands . . . . We therefore now

humbly pray that this declaration may be

granted to us and this would enable us to further

consolidate Jewish public opinion in the

Entente countries to counteract all the demoralizing

influence which the enemy press

is endeavoring to exercise by holding out

vague promises to the Jews and finally to

make the necessary preparations for the constructive

work which would have to begin as

soon as Palestine is liberated .

July 18, 19117, Lord Rothschild submitted a

draft text which became the basis of the Declaration.

The anti-Zionists stormed against it because

of the use of the words "National Home

for the Jewish People." It is thus abundantly

clear as Lloyd George, the great war Premier,

said at Cowbridge, England, October 24, 1930:

"In War time we were anxious to secure the

good will of the Jewish community through38

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

out the world for the Allied cause . The Balfour

Declaration was a gesture not merely on

our part but on the part of the Allies to secure

that valuable support . It was prepared

after much consideration, not merely of its

policy, but of the actual wording, by the representatives

of all the Allied and associated

countries including America, and of our dominion

premiers."

The final draft of what became known as the

Balfour Declaration was amended by the authors

of this book. After consultation with justice

Brandeis it was submitted to Colonel House who

transmitted this version to President Wilson upon

whose agreement and express authority the final

text was issued by the British War Cabinet :

"Foreign Office,

November 2, 1917.

"Dear Lord Rothschild,

"I have much pleasure in conveying to you

on behalf of His Majesty's Government the

following declaration of sympathy with Jewish

Zionist aspirations, which has been submitted

to and approved by the Cabinet :

"'His Majesty's Government view with

favour the establishment in Palestine of a national

home for the Jewish people, and will use

WAR POLICIES

39

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 .'

"I should be grateful if you would bring

this Declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist

Federation .

"Yours sincerely,

(signed) Arthur James Balfour."

A Public Covenant openly arrived at . The

formula, by which Theodor Herzl's "Jewish

State" sought public recognition of Jewish rights,

had been achieved and the British cabinet had

carefully and thoughtfully, despite the powerful

anti-Zionists in London and elsewhere stated

in its preamble that it was a "declaration of

sympathy with Jewish Zionist Aspirations ." Both

the letter and the spirit were thus apparently

fulfilled .

Temperley * reviewing the issue of the Declaration

says : "Support of Zionist ambitions, in-

* A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, edited by H. W. V.

Temperley. Published under the auspices of the British Institute of

International Affairs, Vol . VI (1920), p . 171-3 .

40 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

deed, promised much for the allies. . . . That it

is in purpose a definite contract with Jewry is

beyond question. . . . Before the British Government

gave the Declaration to the world it

had been closely examined in all its bearings and

implications, weighed word by word and subjected

to repeated change and amendment ."

So much for the origin of a text that spelled

new hope for harassed Israel . France approved

it. February 9, 1918 and by December 1918 Japan

joined with the other principal Allied Powers in

supporting the Declaration. In the United States

on August 31, 1918, President Wilson allowed

publicity to be given to a letter written by him

to one of the authors, Rabbi Stephen S . Wise,

then President of the American Zionist Organization,

in which he welcomed :

"The progress made by the Zionist movement

in the United States and in the Allied countries

since the Declaration by Mr . Balfour on

behalf of the British Government of Great

Britain's approval of the establishment in

Palestine of a national home for the Jewish

people ."

At that date and for long after there was no

public knowledge of the MacMahon-Hussein

correspondence . The Balfour Declaration was a

WAR POLICIES

4 1

public pact. The Allies took care to broadcast it .

The Germans published it and the German Wireless

issued it in Jerusalem before the capture of

the city by Allenby in January i 9 i 8. Temperley

* states that when the Declaration was communicated

to Hussein in January 1918 "he took

it philosophically, contenting himself with an

expression of good-will towards a kindred Semitic

race which he understood (as his phrase made

clear) was to lodge in a house owned by Arabs."

* Ibid., Vol. V, p. 132 .

N

ENGLAND'S ORIGINAL

INTERPRETATION

THE form of the betrayal which has aroused

the storm of protests is that the Labor Government,

in order to justify its new administrative

measures, has inverted the Balfour Declaration,

quoting the subordinate clause (see page 39)

"nothing shall be done which may prejudice

the civil and religious rights of existing non-

Jewish communities" as the basic purpose of the

Declaration and the Mandate that followed . We

might well argue, and we are certain that lawyers

can be found who spreading the eye in a

needle to the circumference of the globe, would

maintain that the Declaration hangs on its final

hinge "nothing shall be done which may prejudice

. . . the rights and political status enjoyed

by Jews in any other country ." We protest

against such pettifogging and we refrain from its

employment . If great moral rights hang on nothing

firmer than on inverted interpretation, then

42

ENGLAND'S INTERPRETATION 43

we are sure there is no security in any Bill of

Rights.

Lawyers assure us, and it seems the essence of

common sense, that where there is doubt as to

the meaning of the terms of a contract, an examination

of the state of mind of the parties,

at the time of signing the agreement, is forcible

and pregnant evidence . We turn back therefore

to the fundamental problem . How did British

statesmen view this Declaration when they issued

it in 1917? How did the British press understand

it? The, Spectator said: "A large and thriving Jewish

settlement in the Holy Land . . . would

make for peace and progress in the Near East,

and would thus accord with British policy ." The

Nation (London) agreed that "Mr. Balfour's

declaration translates into a binding statement

of policy the general wish of British opinion."

Not a word in hundreds of papers of the reservation

upon which the Labor Government now

rests its case.

Were the British so bemused that no thought

was given to the Arabs? At a mass meeting held in

London on December 2, 1917, Lord Robert Cecil

said, "Our wish is that Arabian countries shall

be for the Arabs, Armenia for the Armenians,

and Judea for the Jews." Sir Mark Sykes, the

original British negotiator, well informed on

44 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

every detail said : "For Palestine to be a success

you must have a satisfied and tranquil Syria . For

liberty to be certain in Palestine, you must have

guarantees that no savage races shall return

there . . . You want to know the Arab is free,

because he is, and always will be your neighbour."

The Right Hon. Arthur Henderson, M.P., a

member of the present Labor Government sent a

careful message to this London mass meeting in

which he declared on behalf of Labor :

"It trusts that an understanding may be

reached at the close of the war, whereby Palestine

may be set free and form a state under an

International Agreement, to which Jewish

people may return and work out their own

salvation without interference by those of

alien race or religion ."

Herbert Sidebotham, who was Lloyd George's

spokesman during the war, says :

"There can be no doubt that when the

promise was made what was in mind as the

ultimate ideal was the establishment of a Jewish

State in Palestine . That is evident from the

caveat attached to the promise that nothing

should be done that may prejudice the political

status of Jews in other countries . . . that

the ideal of statehood was the inspiration of

ENGLAND'S INTERPRETATION 45

the promise there is no doubt . Lord Balfour,

I feel sure, must have meant that, and I know

that Mr. Lloyd George was Prime Minister

at the time and was as keen a friend to Jewish

aspirations as any one ."

But what of the Arabs and their rights? Let

us leave the hilarious celebration of the Declaration

meetings and turn for answer to Arthur

James Balfour . Surely he knew what was intended

by every word of the Declaration which

bears his signature . The war was over, the Peace

Conference had approved his whole policy . On

July 12, 1920, at the Royal Albert Hall in London,

at a public demonstration to celebrate the

grant of the Mandate for Palestine upon Great

Britain and the incorporation of the Balfour

Declaration in the Treaty of Peace with Turkey,

Mr. Balfour said :

". . . So far as the Arabs are concerned,-

a great, an interesting, and an attractive race

-I hope they will remember that while this

assembly and all Jews that it represents

through the world desire under the aegis of

Great Britain to establish this home for the

Jewish people, the Great Powers, and among

all the Great Powers most especially Great

Britain, has freed them, the Arab race, from

46 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

the tyranny of their brutal conqueror, who

had kept them under his heel for these many

centuries . I hope they will remember it is we

who have established the independent Arab

sovereignty of the Hedjaz . I hope they will

remember that it is we who desire in Mesopotamia

to prepare the way for the future of

a self-governing, autonomous Arab State, and

I hope that, remembering all that, they will

not grudge that small niche-for it is no more

geographically, whatever it may be historically

-that small niche in what are now Arab territories

being given to the people who for all

these hundreds of years have been separated

from it-but surely have a title to develop on

their own lines in the land of their forefathers,

which ought to appeal to the sympathy

of the Arab people as it, I am convinced,

appeals to the great mass of my own Christian

fellow-countrymen ."

Not a thought here of creating an Arab state

on the shoulders of the Jews .

We shall return to this address delivered by

the English statesman who professed freely that

he was a Zionist, in order to consider a document )

prepared by the British Cabinet and solemnly ,

read to the people of Palestine, July 7, 19zo by

Sir Herbert Samuel when he took office in JeruENGLAND'S

INTERPRETATION 47

salem as the first High Commissioner of Palestine.

There is before us a picturesque account of

Sir Herbert rising amid a tense standing assembly;

of his begging all to be seated while he read

in English, followed by solemn translations in

Hebrew and in Arabic-

The King's Message

"To the people of Palestine .

"The Allied Powers whose arms were victorious

in the late war have entrusted to my

country a Mandate to watch over the interests

of Palestine and to ensure to your country

that peaceful and prosperous development

which has so long been denied to you .

"I recall with pride the large part played by

my troops under the command of Field Marshal

Lord Allenby in freeing your country

from Turkish rule, and I shall indeed rejoice

if I and my people can also be the instruments

for bringing within your reach the blessings of

a wise and liberal administration .

"I desire to assure you of the absolute impartiality

with which the duties of the Mandatory

Power will be carried out and of the determination

of my Government to respect the

rights of every race and every creed represented

among you, both in the period which

48 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

has still to elapse before the terms of the Mandate

can be finally approved by the League of

Nations and in the future when the Mandate

has become an accomplished fact .

"You are well aware that the Allied and

Associated Powers have decided that measures

shall be adopted to secure the gradual establishment

in Palestine of a National Home for

the Jewish people. These measures will not in

any way affect the civil or religious rights or

diminish the prosperity of the general population

of Palestine.

"The High Commissioner, whom I have appointed

to carry out these principles will, I am

confident, do so whole-heartedly and effectively,

and will endeavor to promote in every

possible way the welfare and unity of all

classes and sections among you .

"I realise profoundly the solemnity of the

trust involved in the government of a country

which is sacred alike to Christian, Mohammedan,

and Jew, and I shall watch with deep

interest and warm sympathy the future

progress and development of a State whose history

has been of such tremendous import to

the world ."

So spake King George V., to the assembled notaENGLAND'S

INTERPRETATION 49

bles of Palestine. We commend his words to the

Secretary of State for the Colonies, and to the

bewildered Premier.

For a few moments we put the clock forward

two more years and turn to J . Ramsay Mac-

Donald, then a free lance political leader of the

labor group . In July 1922 he visited Palestine and

wrote:

"The Arab population do not and cannot

use or develop the resources of Palestine. This

is not disputed by any one who knows the

country. The total population of Palestine today,

Sir George Adam Smith has pointed out,

is less than was that of Galilee in the time of

Christ. Official reports state that `the country

is now undeveloped and under-populated',

•

. . `largely cultivable areas are left untilled'

• . . of the twelve thousand square miles fit

for cultivation less than four thousand are cultivated.

. . . What is cultivated is badly

worked. `The area of land now cultivated

could yield a far greater product' ; . . . `there

are no forests' ; the Jordan and Yarmuk offer

an abundance of water power, but it is unused.

Already Jewish immigration is changing

that. To the older Jewish settlements and

agricultural schools are owing, to a great extent,

both the Jaffa orange trade and the culf0

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

ture of vines ; to the newer, agricultural

machinery, afforestation, the beginnings of

scientific manuring, the development of

schemes of irrigation and of agricultural cooperation

. Palestine not only offers room for

hundreds of thousands of Jews, it loudly cries

out for more labour and more skill ."

V

THE PEACE CONFERENCE

WE RESUME the chronological record . The war

with its holocaust of humanity and its sacrifice

of idealism upon the altar of patriotic propaganda

ended. Then Armistice day and the Peace

Conference. How stood the promise to the Jews,

what turn and twist did it suffer at the hands of

the players of statecraft? The Jews knew of no

adverse change . If anything some clarity had

been achieved . The understanding of the Zionists

at this critical juncture as to the intent and

purpose of the British policy is abundantly clear.

Dr. Wise being in London and in consultation

with British officials, the American Jewish Congress

which assembled in Philadelphia in December,

i g i 8 adopted resolutions to the end

That there be established such political administrative

and economic conditions in Palestine

as will assure under the trusteeship of

Great Britain, acting on behalf of the League

of Nations as may be formed, the development

of Palestine into a Jewish Commonwealth, it

51

52 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

being clearly understood that nothing shall be

done which shall prejudice the civil and religious

rights, . . .

This interpretation of Jewish National Home

into Jewish Commonwealth was cabled by Dr .

Wise to his associates in New York at the suggestion

of British Officials . The phrase re-appears

in a series of interesting documents . In January

i 9 i 9 there was with government aid prepared in

London a "Memorandum of the Zionist Organization

Relating to the Reconstitution of Palestine

as the Jewish National Home ." The inclusiveness

of this phrase is not accidental . The

document starts off with the statement that the

Balfour Declaration "sought to reach the root

of the Jewish problem in the only way it can be

reached-by providing the Jewish people with

a country and a home." It urged that the Peace

Conference, for which this memorandum was

prepared, should declare that "Palestine is the

home of the Jews" and repeating in substance

the American resolution,

The Peace Conference is asked to indicate

that such measures-political, administrative

and economic-shall be taken as will assure

the development of Palestine into a Jewish

Commonwealth.

THE PEACE CONFERENCE 53

THE PEACE CONFERENCE 53

The italics are in the original which adds : "The

conditions making for an immediate Jewish commonwealth

do not exist in Palestine today ."

Owing to a difference of opinion as to details

in the suggested constitution for Palestine a second

draft was prepared the same month . Then a

third draft was made from both and the last was

discussed in detail at a session held in the Hotel

Meurice, in Paris, in which Dr . Chaim Weizmann,

Mr. N. Sokolow, Bernard Flexner and

Jacob de Haas participated, Sir Herbert Samuel

presiding and acting unofficially for the British

government. This "statement of the Zionist Organization

regarding Palestine" is dated third

day of February nineteen hundred and nineteen,

and was formally presented February 27th to the

Supreme Council wherein the "proposals to the

Peace Conference" were thus summarized :

Palestine shall be placed under such political

administrative and economic conditions as will

secure the establishment there of the Jewish

National Home and ultimately render possible

the creation of an autonomous commonwealth,

it being clearly understood . . .

This document drawn up with the advice of

Sir Herbert Samuel, in consultation with British

officials outlined in detail the administrative procS4

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

esses that were then soberly envisaged in the

creation of the Jewish National Home . There

was to be "a Jewish Council for Palestine" to be

elected by "a Jewish Congress representative of

the Jews of Palestine and of the world" to "cooperate

and consult with and to assist the Government

of Palestine in any and all matters

affecting the Jewish people in Palestine and in all

cases to be and act as the representative of the

Jewish people ."

All to the end that "the Jews . . . take an honorable

place in the new community of Nations .

It is their purpose to establish in Palestine a government

dedicated to social and national justice.

. . ." There is no ambiguity here.

Had the Arabs been forgotten? On January f,

I9I9 in London, Prince Feisal acting for his

father King Hussein signed an agreement with

Dr. Chaim Weizmann in which he expressly

acknowledged the separation of Palestine from

the Arab states, though he was anxious that the

Jewish Homeland should cooperate with his proposed

Pan-Arab union of states .

The Anglo-Asian adventurer and mystery

monger Colonel T . E. Lawrence was present.

The meeting was brought about by British officials.

In Paris Prince Feisal wrote the following

letter :

THE PEACE CONFERENCE 55

"Delegation Hedjazienne

Paris, March 3, 1919.

"Dear Mr. Frankfurter :

"I want to take this opportunity of my

first contact with American Zionists to tell

you what I have often been able to say to

Dr. Weizmann in Arabia and Europe. We

feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in

race, having suffered similar oppressions at

the hands of powers stronger than themselves,

and by a happy coincidence have been

able to take the first step towards the attainment

of their national ideals together. We

Arabs, especially the educated among us, look

with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist

movement. Our deputation here in Paris is

fully acquainted with the proposals submitted

yesterday by the Zionist Organisation

to the Peace Conference and we regard them

as moderate and proper. We will do our best

insofar as we are concerned to help them

through. We will wish the Jews a most hearty

welcome home. With the chiefs of your

movement, especially with Dr . Weizmann, we

have had, and continue to have the closest

relations. He has been a great helper of our

cause and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a

position to make the Jews some return for

56 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

their kindness . We are working together for

a reformed and revived Near East, and our

two movements complete one another. The

Jewish movement is national and not imperialist

; our movement is national and not

imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us

both. Indeed, I think that neither can be a real

success without the other .

"People less informed and less responsible

than our leaders and yours, ignoring the need

for co-operation of the Arabs and Zionists,

have been trying to exploit the local difficulties

that must necessarily arise in Palestine in

the early stages of our movement. Some of

them have, I am afraid, misrepresented your

aims to the Arab peasantry and our aims to

the Jewish peasantry with the result that interested

parties have been able to make capital

out of what they call our differences. I wish

to give you my firm conviction that these differences

are; not on questions of principle but

on matters of detail, such as must inevitably

occur in every contact of neighbouring peoples

and as are easily adjusted by mutual goodwill.

Indeed, nearly all of them will disappear

with fuller knowledge . I look forward, and

my people with me look forward, to a future

in which we will help you and you will help us

THE PEACE CONFERENCE S7

so that the countries in which we are mutually

interested may once again take their places in

the community of civilised people of the

world:

"Believe me, Yours sincerely,

(signed) Feisal ."

It has, we hope been made abundantly clear

that what England proposed to do for the Jews

and what the Zionists sought at the hands of

Great Britain and the Allied Powers, was not to

create certain minority rights for the Jews in

Palestine . Nor had the Zionists sought permission

to establish some vague Jewish spiritual center

in Jerusalem. Nor had they confined their requests

to a restricted and limited immigration .

Such requests would not have justified the appearance

of representatives of the Zionist movement

before the Supreme Council of the Peace

Conference. There was so much more on foot,

that one French Jew, Sylvan Levy, offered his

protest against it, before the assembled representatives

of the Powers .

The Jews had no official status at the Peace

Conference. The late Secretary of State Robert

Lansing devoted himself therefore to the details

of the Zionist hearing with great deliberation,

because the Powers, by their previous formal ad58

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

herence to the Balfour Declaration, were anxious

amid the formality that attached to the Peace

Conference sessions, to make clear that they were

about to do a new thing for the Jewish-people .

To restrict Jews as immigrants ; to limit their

right of purchasing or owning land ; to ring

fence them in a percentage norm, is not a new

experience for Jews . The sanction of the Peace

Conference was not necessary to provide the

British Government with the authority so to act .

Nor if the concept of either the Jews or the

Powers had been that of permitting sufficient

Jews to settle in Palestine to make a nucleus

around a "spiritual center" would the assent of

the Peace Conference have been in point . There

are at this time according to cultural predilections,

"spiritual centers" of the Jews or of

Judaism in Wilna, Voloyshin, Breslau, Pressburg,

Berlin, Frankfurt, London, New York and Cincinnati.

We will add that Jerusalem prior to the

war was also a spiritual center though of a type

different from all the others .

Obviously the political Zionist movement was

not founded to establish another such center, or

a concentration of a number of these in Palestine

for the spread of some particular phase of

Jewish idealism . Obviously two hundred thousand

Jews would not have bound themselves toTHE

PEACE CONFERENCE 59

gether to influence governments in order to

establish-to express the idea in concrete termsa

series of garden cities around a Hebrew University.

That aspect of Zionism, which has its

place in the general scheme of things, needed

neither the Balfour Declaration nor the assent

of the Powers, nor the petition to the Peace Conference,

nor the presence of Great Britain in

Palestine as the Mandatory entrusted with the

task of fostering and developing the Jewish National

Home. Titus agreed to it in 70 c. E., Babylon

had it for centuries . So did Cordova and

Worms. Concord, Massachusetts, America's one

time "spiritual center" was not legalized by international

law.

The Turks raised no objection to the form in

which that spiritual center existed in Palestine ;

the Arabs would no doubt have ignored it . Yet

the problem of the Jewish National Home as

presented at the Peace Conference was so closely

bound up with considerations of the rights of

the Arabs, that Sir Mark Sykes, who was in

Syria at the end of the War, hurried to Paris

in February, 1919, to report to his chiefs on the

political conditions in Palestine and Syria. We

quote from his biography :

He had motored to Jaff a to meet the Zionist

6o THE GREAT BETRAYAL

delegation. He has visited Nazareth and

Tiberias on the way to Damascus. He has seen

the Emir Feisal before his departure to London.

At Hama, a great reception met him . . .

he saluted the Arab flag . . . designed by

Mark, himself . At Aleppo he drafted a reform

scheme . . . and left for Adama, whence he

returned with his old ally Picot . . . . His last

speech was made at the Arab Club in Aleppo

on January 15. . . . Before he left Damascus,

he induced the Arabs and Zionists to meet and

discuss their future .

Sykes arrived in Paris February i, 1919, "in

the midst of the gigantic Conference-intrigue ."

We know from the minutes of Sykes' conference

with the Arabs and Zionists in Damascus what

he must have reported in Paris. Mr. E. W.

Lewin-Epstein, former Treasurer of the American

Zionist Provisional Committee, and member

at the time of the Zionist Commission in Jerusalem,

was present at the Damascus session . His

notes, written in Hebrew, show that the Arabs

did protest against the obvious political implications

of the Jewish National Home . The Arabs

made the same claims and the same threats that

the Grand Mufti made in 1929 and again in 1930.

The Zionists presented their historic rights and

the promises of the Powers. The upshot was that

THE PEACE CONFERENCE 61

Sir Mark Sykes bluntly told the Arabs to stop

complaining and satisfy themselves with what

the' flag represented :

Black fez for the Abbasids of Bagdad, white

for the Omyyads of Damascus, green for the

Alids of Herbela, and red chevron for Mudhar,

heredity.*

Sykes had written Sept. 2, 19 118 to the Premier

Lloyd George of "our Arab, Syrian and Palestinian

Policy" of "Arab officers, Zionist Agents,

and Syrian colonies." Sykes according to his biographer

was in grave doubts at the end, as to the

wisdom of his Zionist adventure . The reaffirmation

of the Jewish National Home by the Peace

Conference was made upon full knowledge of

the facts. Notwithstanding, a certain measure

of retreat was provided for the Conference decisions

by President Wilson. Acting under misapprehensions,

the malignly anti-Zionist aim of

which he was too honest to discern, President

Wilson was led to send the King-Crane commission

of inquiry to Syria and Palestine . The work

of this commission proved abortive as soon as

President Wilson understood the spirit of partisanship

in which the commission had moved . That

* Mark Sykes : His Life and Letters by Shane Leslie, New York, 1923,

PP. 200-1 .

62 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

the report of this American Commission was not

published at the time, alters in no way what we

have constructively proved by documentary evidence-

that the political issue involved in the

creation of the Jewish National Home was a

known factor to all the plenipotentiaries who

voted for it in Paris in i 9 i 9 .

We urge, therefore, that the breach planned by

the Passfield White Paper is not merely an infraction

of the Mandatory towards the Jews, but

that it is a violation of an agreement with all the

powers, including the United States, which participated

in the Peace Conference and deliberately

voted in i 9 i g for the creation in Palestine

of the Jewish National Home. We shall gauge

the full measure of the breach, but we insist that,

if the comparison between promise and performance

proves our contention, then the verdict of

the public conscience is as important as the

formal decision of some court that may have

jurisdiction in the cause.

We distinguish, here, as we shall throughout,

between acts of government and the will of peoples.

Also, we draw a distinction between Jewish

rights and Arab claims. Whether the Palestinian

population in 1914 possessed any tangible political

rights it is for those versed in Turkish law

to say. In practice, we know that such rights did

THE PEACE CONFERENCE 63

not exist, even though the Young Turks had

created a paper Parliament.

Djemal Pasha ruled in Palestine with an iron

hand, as every Turk had done before him though

he too may have indulged the people in paper

rights . The term Political rights does not appear

in the Balfour Declaration . The phrase used is

civil rights and as we have made abundantly clear

every word of that document was weighed by

more than a score of authorities.

Even the Report of the Commission on the

Palestine Disturbances of August, 1929, which

is fundamental to the Passfield White Paper and

the Hope-Simpson report, is vague on Arab rights

at the beginning of the war. In this report we

read : (page 9)

The first few years of the present century

were a period of disturbances in Turkish politics

culminating in the revolution of 19o8 and

the grant of the Constitution of that year .

These events were not without their repercussion

in Palestine, as is shown by the following

passage quoted from a report which the Committee

on Local Government in Palestine made

to the High Commissioner on the 2nd of June,

1924:

"The Ottoman Constitution of 19o8 had

64 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

awakened new hopes among the subject

races of the Empire . In various provinces,

and in Syria and Palestine in particular, a

widespread movement took place in favour

of decentralisation which had in 1912 assumed

such proportions as to threaten to

become a dangerous separatist movement .

The Turkish Government thought it wise

to pass the Provisional Vilayet Law, which

was received with peculiar satisfaction and

pride. To the people of Syria and Palestine

it came, not as a favour granted by a benevolent

Government, but rather as a just

recognition of their rights and aspirations ;

and we think that, in considering the Turkish

system of 119113, due attention should

be paid to the circumstances which brought

about its establishment as well as to the satisfaction

with which it was received ."

The Provisional Vilayet Law, to which

reference is made in the passage quoted above,

was modified by a further Ottoman Law of

the 16th of April, 1914 and the effect of the

legislation as amended, was to confer on the

provinces of the Ottoman Empire powers of

local government involving real autonomy.

The Arab case, apart from the rights that

THE PEACE CONFERENCE 65

inhere from living in a country, rests upon a

secret correspondence between a British general

in command in Egypt and an Arabian Emir,

who exercised at the time no political or civil

authority in Palestine . We, who urge Jewish

rights, would welcome the publication of these

agreements. But, we repeat, our Zionist claim

in Palestine rests upon no private understandings

or secret arrangements, but on public acts, not

only of Great Britain, but of the Peace Conference

and subsequently of the League of Nations.

The good faith of half of mankind is involved

in the justice we seek at the hands of the

people of the British Empire, and of the nations

which in one form of association or another

fought beside her in the World War and helped

to make the Peace .

The Zionists confess to this day that they are

novices in diplomacy. They still have abundant

respect for the word. New York Jewry still

meditates at times, over a promise extracted by

Peter Stuyvesant from the Jewish refugees who

landed in 1 6 5 5 and promised to take care of their

own poor. That pledge is the whip that raises

voluntary millions for charity, which might

otherwise be legally paid out of the public exchequer.

The Zionists assumed in the summer of

i 9 i 9 that Britain's word was law to British

66 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

officialdom . The contrary, however, was the fact.

General Allenby was naturally a member of the

military party that scorned all the fine declamations

of civil statesmen, however high their

authority and rank . Palestine was "Occupied

Enemy Territory Administration" and under

military occupation . The wreckage of war was

still visible. Allenby simply ignored the Balfour

Declaration. General Money, who was in direct

control of Palestine, took his cue from his superior

officer. His own subordinates were responsive .

They objected to the partition of Syria and the

creation of three entities-Palestine, Syria and

Trans-Jordan . They feared Haifa was under the

guns of Beyrout, so they objected to the French

in the North and they calmly ignored the Jews

in Palestine .

A civil agent of the military Government, a

gentleman named Gabriel, busied himself in promoting

British commercial interests . His circulars

betrayed in culpable language the belief

that Palestine was part of the British Empire .

Commercial contracts were given British officers

seeking advantageous retirement from military

life. The American, British and Palestinian Jewish

legionaries who had voluntarily enlisted in the

British Army for the capture of Palestine, were

THE PEACE CONFERENCE 67

treated with contempt. Plenty of portents of

storm.

Military occupation explained all. The facts

were firmly but accurately presented in Paris in

August. In a personal conference with justice

Brandeis, Mr. Balfour explained the circumambulations

of bureaucracy, but he ordered, and

there was sent to Palestine to Allenby and his

subordinates, an official message from the British

Foreign office, declaring that the Jewish National

Home Policy was chose jugee.

We invite the present British Government to

exhume that document of August, i9 i 9, from

the archives of the Foreign Office . It professed

to close an issue which is now all doubt and confusion.

Military control! The civil administration

would change everything. The Zionists trusted

and labored. In May, 19lo, to the amazement of

the Palestinian Jews and the Zionists throughout

the world, riots broke out in Jaifa and Jerusalem .

The Jews were thunderstruck. Allegations flew

freely . Charges were made that the Military Governor

of Jerusalem was implicated . But a strict

check was exerted on all Zionists . The National

Home was imperiled in other directions . At the

London Zionist Cbnference of July, 19zo, Dr.

68 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

Weizmann reported publicly on the adverse conduct

of the military authorities.

"What was thought of Zionism in London

was ignored willingly or unwillingly by the

military administration . . . the English administration

was . . . anti-Zionist and perhaps

anti-Jewish ."

But during that strainful spring of 1920, the

British and the French were discussing the

boundaries of Palestine . The British Cabinet had

no stomach for contesting the delimitations set

up by the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May, 1916 .

These amiable and learned gentlemen, though

Sykes was a real authority on the Near East, had

drawn a line across Palestine from the Ladder

of Tyre to the north of Lake Tiberias . The economic

possibilities of the area to the south had

not concerned them in the least degree . Political

divisions alone, interested them .

No Arab Chief, no Grand Mufti appealed to

them against a mutilated Palestine. The only

party of interest was the Zionist. It was the

American Zionist leaders that prevailed upon

President Wilson, then on a sickbed, to cable a

protest to the British Cabinet, which acted as a

"bombshell," to use Lloyd George's description

of its effect upon him and his confreres . A few

THE PEACE CONFERENCE 69

square miles, particularly the headwaters of the

Jordan were recovered for Palestine .

The following letter was addressed to President

Wilson who immediately ordered it to be sent to

the British Cabinet as his personal opinion :

"Negotiations in Paris on the Turkish settlement

have reached so critical a stage in their

effects upon the realization of the Balfour Declaration

in Palestine as to compel me to appeal

to you.

"My associates of the Zionist Organization

wire me from Paris that in the conferences on

the Turkish Treaty, France now insists upon

the terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement-one

of the secret treaties made in 1916 before our

entrance into the War . If the French contention

should prevail it would be disastrous to

the realization of the establishment of the Jewish

Homeland in Palestine, inasmuch as the

Sykes-Picot agreement divides the country in

complete disregard of historical boundaries and

natural necessities. The Zionist cause depends

upon rational northern and eastern boundaries

for a self-sustaining, economic development of

the country. This means on the north, Palestine

must include the Litany River and the Watersheds

of the Hermon, and on the east it must

70 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

include the plains of the Jaulon and the

Haulon. Narrower than this is a mutilation.

"If the Balfour Declaration subscribed to by

France as well as the other Allied and Associated

Powers is to have more than paper value

there can be no compromise as to the guarantees

by which the Balfour Declaration is to be

secured.

"I need not remind you that neither in this

country nor in Paris has there been any opposition

to the Zionist Program, and to its

realization the boundaries I have named are indispensable.

The Balfour Declaration which we

know you made possible was a public promise .

I venture to suggest that it may be given to you

at this time to move the statesmen of Christian

nations to keep this solemn promise to the hope

of Israel. It is your word at this hour to Millerand

and Lloyd George which may be decisive

."

Incidentally this letter conveys distinctly the

1920 understanding of what the Balfour Declaration

implied .

This "crisis" having terminated, we need to

glance at the San Remo Peace Conference of

1920, when the Mandate was formally awarded

to Great Britain, and Sir Herbert Samuel was

immediately appointed High Commissioner of

~ ,O-( ry *hittR.rr,.LtAlPlAw."

W' see( .

ha,• reached so erltioal~

t~'~Lhi~

io~°e nhe T rasha tt an

the Ba1fasr Hambmddmfmu Deolantion n Palestine as to aonpal a to

appeal to you.

^

my assooiatftof the Zionist Organisation eQisPrA&

ae from Paris that in the coaferoaces on the Turkish Treaty, Trance now insists

upon the terms of the tyke-Pink earo ent - one of the secret treatise

ef6ivl! .;Jr(/

node in 1916 before~ outran. into the War . If "ftemM castactionA

should

prevail4 it would es•s2f a0veue'LQ t ~r~sal, .isation of the r A of the

Jewish Roseland•in-Arleebtne, IaasmuetL~s the Sykes-Pioot~1agreement divides the

country in complete disiegard of historiod boundaries an iaietigl necessities .

.~pomatty,a1 northern and eastern boundaries PeroG-

rolf-austainind,eeoonamio development of the country . TAILasseze A the north

Ah

Qs the cost 1t met include the plains of the Jaulon and the Hanron Waamowr

I+rrl~I f,vFyeA.v

,I

'

t '

than this A

msti *tionq//rtr~kerrru"it tMs,il n

1-"t s a'I3ou"r"' Vsolantioo in' eirTh d to by Prince as ea1 ae the

~4, trrertl c r'f(,4

Mar Allied and Associated Powers is to has .

a ~~Nw Abaur"Off ,, .

rP(

our

tmi Tr to

pe.

t.

/,'c

Ai!tte •I elIVr4( ,vx,~r1(1* ke /1-

,%tc~w/yii!

p "-either in this country nor in Paris has there

been any opposition to the Zionist program, a fl t Ie

'bdM'r11!e

le . The Selfour Deolant,onnhl, h s4

-L.er you ands

possible,was a public promise . I lecture to suggest that it say be givesto you

at this time to sovs the statesaes o" Chrisu6n nations to keep this solemn

promise to eha,ho snot Israel . -LS-ks our word,

_Tat this hour to Hilterand and Lloyd

George eMs^say be decisive .

Facsimile of the draft of the letter presented February

1920 to President Wilson, who from his sickbed authorized

its cabling to Lloyd George as expressing his own views on

the Palestine boundary question .

72 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

Palestine. Our interest is first in the words of a

resolution which was addressed to Lloyd George

then at San Remo .-

"At meetings held in London this week the

Parliamentary Labour Party, the Executive

Committee of the Labour Party and the

Parliamentary Committee of the Trades

Union Congress have adopted resolutions to

remind the British Government of the Declarations

made on November 2, 1917, that the

Government would endeavour to facilitate the

establishment of a Jewish National Home in

Palestine, a declaration that was in harmony

with the declared War Aims of the British

Labour Movement, and which was cordially

welcomed by all sections of the British people

and was reaffirmed by Earl Curzon on November

2, i 9 i 9. The National Labour Organisations

indicated, now urge upon His Majesty's

Government the necessity of redeeming

this pledge by the acceptance of a mandate

under the League of Nations for the Administration

of Palestine; with a view of its being

reconstituted the National Home of the Jewish

people. The National Committee desire to associate

themselves with the many similar

representations being made to the Government

urging the settlement of this question with

THE PEACE CONFERENCE 73

the utmost despatch both in the interests of

Palestine itself as well as in the interest of the

Jewish People ."

J. R. Clynes, Acting Chairman Parliamentary

Labour Party

H. S. Lindsay, Secretary Parliamentary

Labour Party

W. H. Hutchinson, Chairman Labour

Party Executive

J. H. Thomas, Chairman Trades Union

Congress

C. W. Bowerman, Secretary Trades Union

Congress.

There is no reproach offered the British Labor

Party in quoting its 192o resolution . Apparently

the Party, as such, has not repented its decision .

What is impressive, however, at this critical time

when Lord Passfield supported by Mr . Mac-

Donald undertake to invert the Balfour Declaration

is, that the party interpreted the Declaration,

which they quote, in exactly the opposite

spirit to that now employed by these statesmen .

The words italicized by us, but employed among

others by J. H. Thomas, a member of the present

Cabinet, are simple enough . They urged Great

Britain to accept the Mandate, so that Palestine,

not a part of it or a city within it, but Pales74

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

tine as a whole shall be "reconstituted the National

Home of the Jewish People."

Therefore, we maintain, with our fellow-Jews,

and many non-Jews including Englishmen that

the creation of the Jewish National Home and

not the Arab or other interest is the dominant

clause of the Declaration and the object of the

Mandate. We do so in agreement with the policies

enunciated by the British Labor Party in i920.

Nor is the language of the particular resolution

an accident . The Labor Party was deeply interested

in the Palestine project. It knew of the

American Zionist position regarding social justice

as embodied in the Pittsburgh Program of 1918 ;

it knew, too, of the whole progressive policy

enunciated by the Poale Zion .

The British Labor Party felt it had a good

deal more than a perfunctory interest in Palestine.

So a year after the San Remo Conference,

when the carvers of imperial interests had destroyed

the physical unity of Palestine by chopping

off Trans-Jordan, the Labor Party at its

Conference in Brighton, England (i 92 i )

adopted another resolution .

"That this Conference, taking cognizance

of the assumption by Great Britain of mandatory

powers over Palestine with the object of

assuring the development of a Jewish AutonoTHE

PEACE CONFERENCE 75

moos Commonwealth, demands that the upbuilding

of that country-the settlement of

the land question, the institution of public

work and agricultural and industrial enterprises-

shall be effected not upon the foundations

of capitalist exploitation, but in the

interests of labor.

"The Conference regrets that the economic

and administrative unity of Palestine has been

sacrificed because of the imperialistic rivalries

between Britain and France, and that the territory

has been wantonly reduced and the

opportunities of its colonisation seriously endangered

by the cutting off of Hauran and

nearly the whole of upper Galilee . The Conference

calls upon the Government to put an

end to the unnatural and harmful division of

the British Mandate territory and to effect the

unity o f Eastern and Western Palestine.

"The Conference believes that it is necessary,

in the interests of the settlement and

peaceable growth of Palestine and in furtherance

of the development of self-governing institutions,

that both the Jews and the Arabs

shall have full right of taxation for their

specific needs ."

Were the Zionist views presented to the Peace

Conference in 119i9 an exaggeration of the views

76 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

then prevailing in non-Jewish circles? The

British Labor Party maintained the same interpretation

of the Balfour Declaration in 1921

when it protested against splitting Palestine by

creating a separate province, with a separate

mandate for Trans-Jordan, financially as well as

economically at the cost of Palestine . Who did

this carving and why was it done? The deed is

buried in the dim pigeon-holes of bureaucrats

who work silently and stealthily operate policies

of administration. Trans-Jordan is a large area

of fertile land with no people, no cities, with only

the Jordan as frontier to the west . The rest is

open space . Even the Shaw Report of 1929 which

whitewashes so much, writes uneasily of this

splitting of Palestine : (page 6)

Viewed in the light of the history of the

last six centuries, Palestine is an artificial conception.

Under the Ottoman regime it formed

part only of an administrative unit, the remainder

of which consisted of areas now within

the jurisdiction of the Governments of other

neighbouring mandated territories . Its frontiers,

too, are largely artificial. In many parts

they are frequented by nomad tribes who by

inter-governmental agreement are allowed unhindered

passage across these frontiers for the

THE PEACE CONFERENCE 77

purpose of exercising rights of grazing which

they have acquired by long usage . In Turkish

times the members of the tribes were Ottoman

subjects ; today some are technically of

Palestinian, some of Trans-Jordan and some

of Syrian nationality, but it is at least doubtful

whether they themselves recognise distinctions

of this character .

The frontier is wide open to the East of Palestine.

The nomads do cross it to settle in Palestine.

The Jews are however forbidden to

purchase land in Trans-Jordan . One consequence

is alluded to in the "Report and General Abstracts

of the Census of 1922": (page 4)

The Ottoman authorities in 1914 placed the

tribal population of Beersheba at S S,ooo and

since that date there has been a migration of

tribes from the Hedjaz and Southern Trans-

Jordan into the Beersheba area mainly as a

result of a succession of adequate rainfalls and

of pressure exerted by other tribes east of the

River Jordan .

The boundaries of Palestine in one official

statement of the Zionist Organization submitted

to the Supreme Council of the Peace Conference

were to be, on the north from a point south of

Sidon, following the watershed to the divid78

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

ing line of the slopes of the Hermon "close to

and west of the Hedjaz Railway." "In the East

a line close to and west of the Hedjaz Railway

terminating in the Gulf of Akaba" and there

was added "in the details of the delimitations, or

any necessary adjustments of detail, shall be

settled by a Special Commission on which there

shall be Jewish representation ."

Apart from the fact that there was in i9i9

no suggestion of the division of Palestine into

two countries, the outline of the boundaries with

the request for Jewish representation on the

boundaries commission makes clear that neither

in the mind of Sir Herbert Samuel who sat in

on the drafting of the "statement" nor of the

British officials who advised on the details, nor

the Peace Conference to which it was presented

was there any idea that Jewish National Home

implied a minority position for the Jews in

Palestine .

.-: VI

THE MANDATE

THE repeatedly redrafted Mandate for Palestine

came up for final discussion in July, 1922 . A

threat that it would not issue, we understand,

was the pressure exerted on the Zionist Executive

to force it to approve the Churchill White Paper .

Though it bears the signature of Winston

Churchill as Colonial Secretary, it was issued at

the instance of Sir Herbert Samuel, who is also

regarded as its author and whose conduct from

December 2, 1914, when he declared "that he

stood for Zionism not only in the Cabinet but out

of it" to date, is one of the mystifying facts in

this complex situation .

The threat of postponing the issuance of the

Mandate could only have "worked" with a nervous

group of men harassed by the demands of

Zionists who had become tense over the long delay

of the promised document and fearful that

the Arab protests, less numerous than now and

less public, would under the weak control exer-

79

8o THE GREAT BETRAYAL

cised by the High Commissioner, lead to some

modification of the much wished for document .

That modification was effected-if legally it is

a modification-by the Churchill White Paper,

which interprets the intent of the Mandate. To

the authors, who are not lawyers, the Churchill

White Paper is not binding . It is no more part

of the Mandate than is Lord Passfield's White

Paper. It interests us as exhibiting the state of

mind of the British Government . It exposes what

in 1922 the Government conceived to be minimum

and maximum of the Jewish National

Home. It is, like Lord Passfield's statement, an

exposition of the theory underlying the policy

which the Administration undertook to set into

operation . Whether one or the other or both of

these administrative policies square with the intent

of the Declaration and the purport of the

Mandate is the question. We shall judge the conduct

of the British Government by a fair rule,

"by their acts shall ye know them."

The Mandate (see Appendix III p. 183) was

formally issued in July, 1922 in response to a

"memorandum submitted to the Council of the

League of Nations by the Zionist Organization,"

which thus sets forth the Zionist claim:

What the Zionists demand and have deTHE

MANDATE

81

manded from the outset is . . . not a matter of

toleration but a matter of right. To this is

added, as a corollary, the demand that the establishment

in Palestine of the Jewish National

Home should be recognized as an undertaking

in which the Jewish people as a whole

has a legitimate interest and an unquestionable

status.

The answer to the first demand is in the preamble

of the Mandate, in words that should sear

British official minds :

Whereas the principal Allied Powers have

also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible

for putting into effect the Declaration

originally made on November 2, 19117 by

the Government of His Britannic Majesty and

adopted by the said Powers . . . . Whereas recognition

has thereby been given to the historical

connection of the Jewish people with Palestine

and to the grounds for reconstituting their

national home in that country .

Thus the British Cabinet was in complete

accord with the spirit of the title of the first

Zionist memorandum of January, 1919 "relating

to the Reconstitution of Palestine as the Jewish

National Home ." (Compare page 52.)

8z THE GREAT BETRAYAL

White Paper, black paper-here was the world,

with Great Britain in the lead, answering the

Zionists in the language of the Zionists . How

could there be any misunderstanding of the connotation

of the idealogy employed?

The second request, that "the Jewish people as

a whole has a legitimate interest and an unquestionable

status" in the establishment of the Jewish

National Home, was met by Article 4 of the

Mandate :

An appropriate Jewish Agency shall be

recognised as a public body for the purpose of

advising and co-operating with the Administration

of Palestine . . .

The Zionist Organisation . . . shall take steps

in consultation with His Britannic Majesty's

Government to secure the co-operation of all

Jews willing to assist in the establishment of

the Jewish National Home .

The British Government has ever since, in

formal official statements as mandatory and in

reports to the Mandates Commission of the

League of Nations, reaffirmed its adherence to

the Balfour Declaration . It is still doing so . Merely

for the record, we cite the following :

Lord Curzon-(Palestine still being under

the Foreign Office) -to Mr . Sokolow, NovemTHE

MANDATE

83

ber I, i 9 i 9 : There has been no change in the

policy of the Government with regard to the

establishment of a Jewish National Home in

Palestine.

The Colonial Secretary to the High Commissioner

for Palestine, October 4,1923 (Command

Paper 1 989 [19231) : "The Key-note

of British policy in Palestine . . . is to be found

in the Balfour Declaration . . . the policy of

the Declaration . . . formed an essential part

of the conditions on which Great Britain accepted

the Mandate for Palestine, and thus

constitutes an international obligation from

which there can be no question of receding."

Mr. J. H. Thomas (Colonial Secretary),

House of Commons, February 25, 1924 (Official

Report, Column 63) :

"His Majesty's Government have decided

after careful consideration of all the circumstances

to adhere to the policy of giving effect

to the Balfour Declaration of 1917."

Like statements have issued year by year ever

since the summer of 1927 when the first Wailing

Wall incident happened . The intensity of

these verbal declarations has only added to the

despair produced by the contrariness of the practiced

policy that has accompanied them . August,

1929 witnessed the first real pogrom in Pales84

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

tine under British rule. There followed an outcry

that disturbed the serenity of officialdom . There

was no mistaking the undercurrent of belief that

these outrages, incited by cultivated Islamic fanaticism,

were either the result of official neglect

of duty or were indirectly instigated by the anti-

Zionist attitude of British officials in Palestine .

The Wailing Wall incident, which has more

recently occupied the attention of the League's

special commission and is the presumptive cause

of the Arab outburst, would in all its pros and

cons fill a book. We are concerned here only with

one phase of it,-the conduct of British officialdom

in Palestine . It has in every detail been un-

British, ungallant, and has exhibited in every detail

of conduct and regulation, contempt for the

Jews in Palestine and, equally contempt for Jews

throughout the world. The rights and wrongs of

legal continuous use, the justice of claims of ownership,

etc .,-these stand apart as matters discussable

. The interference with people during

public worship, the raising of vexatious issues as to

whether benches are not permissible in a cut de

sac and the approval of breaching the Wall in

order to turn this closed-in area into a passage,

such acts are not the conduct one would expect

from men educated in English universities and

trained in the English civil service to a sense of

THE MANDATE

85

fair play. We doubt whether these same men

would have interfered, however provoked, in a

voodoo service on the West Coast of Africa . If

the Arabs in the August, 1929 massacres believed

that the government was with them, the conduct

of the British officials fully justified that belief .

We are however more concerned with what

followed. The government repeated at Geneva

and in Parliament its stereotyped determination

to carry out the Mandate and to adhere to the

Balfour Declaration. And thereafter it adopted

a thorough-going characteristic Colonial Office

policy. It sent a Parliamentary Commission

headed by a Colonial Judge, Sir Walter Shaw, directed

by a Colonial Office official, Mr. T. I. K.

Lloyd as Secretary, together with two Treasury

officials, as official reporters to Palestine to "whitewash"

the Palestine Administration . Happily the

commission included the representative of the

Labor Party, Hon. Harry Snell, M.P., who, although

ultimately a signatory to the report, annexed

a memorandum the essence of which is

more than a mere dissent, for it is incisively critical

of many of the conclusions of his Commission

colleagues. Though the object, according to Lord

Passfield's letter of instructions of September 13,

1929, was "to inquire into the immediate causes

which led to the recent outbreak in Palestine and

86 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

to make recommendations as to the steps necessary

to avoid a recurrence," the Commission went

beyond its instructions . We do not regret that this

commission, though it did "whitewash" officialdom,

went into matters beyond its province . Because

by its own wide investigation it laid bare and

finally forced into public print the whole scheme

of thought that lay behind the gradual undoing,

by semi-private administrative acts, of the Balfour

Declaration and the Mandate .

Accordingly the Secretary of State for the

Colonies presented to Parliament by command

of His Majesty, March, 1930, a "report of the

Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of

August, 1929," largely the composition of Mr .

T. I. K. Lloyd, its secretary and, as noted, a

Colonial Office official. The substantial, positive

and most impressive factors of this Blue Book are

the graphs (one of which is reproduced on the

opposite page) showing "the Growth of Population

in Palestine on Certain Assumptions ." Mr.

Mills, Assistant Chief Secretary of the Palestine

Government, undertook to demonstrate how the

Jewish settlement in Palestine could be "crystallized"

and the preponderance of Arabs maintained.

The immediate result of the riots, a repetition

of the method employed in 1920, was to suspend

3000

2500

12

z2

mazz

IL 15

0

0a

1920 1930 1940

GRAPH N 4 LV

1950

1960

1970

YEARS

1990 1990 2000

This graph, reproduced from the Shaw Report, illustrates

the practicability, by a minimum o f Jewish immigration,

of keeping the Jewish and Arab Populations of Palestine at

a relatively stationary position .

b

I

Q`~y

tA4 1sv°~

88 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

the certificates previously issued to enable Jewish

laborers to settle in Palestine under a quota system

arranged between the government officials

and the Jewish Agency and Zionist officials in

Jerusalem. The government denied that there

was a political motive behind this "suspension" of

Jewish immigration, but the bounden developers

of the Jewish National Home, ignoring the plausibilities

of London for realities of Jerusalem, undertook

to show how it would never come to pass.

By limiting Jewish immigration to ten thousand

immigrants per annum, the Arab population will

in 1970-8o approximate 1,750,000, and the Jews

number 1,250,000. In other words the relative

position of the population will remain nearly

stationary. This graph is the Labor Government's

answer in 1930 to the Labor Party's resolution of

1921 . Were Ramsay MacDonald and Lord Passfield

at that 1921 Party Conference?

Why this repudiation?

The terms of the Mandate for Palestine were,

as we have noted already, under discussion at the

Peace Conference in 1919. Zionist and British

Foreign officials busied themselves with its details .

The American Zionists, in particular, retained a

voluntary staff of competent legal draftsmen to

draw up what they desired to be a model document.

Justice, equity, social progress, humanity,

THE MANDATE

89

equality were written into those drafts . Responsibility

had not quenched the Jewish thirst for

creating a new order in this old world . The Peace

Conference procrastinated . The Mandate discussions

were deferred. The volunteers returned to

their homes,-officialdom came into possession of

the situation. San Remo, with the appointment

of what the Jews naively believed was a second

Ezra, in the person of Sir Herbert Samuel as the

First High Commissioner, kindled a flame of enthusiasm

that swept away fears and doubts.

There was faith, abiding faith in the word of the

British Government .

The era of public covenants openly arrived at

was at an end .-The Colonial Office obtained

possession of Palestine-a silent bureaucracy was

steadily at work . It had, as was later apparent, the

support of the High Commissioner, who in order

to walk straight in his great office, was bending

backward. The result was that, almost simultaneously

with the issuance of the Mandate, there

was published one of those famous White Papers,

which have added so much to the drab misery of

the Jewish people. This was the famous Churchill

White Paper drafted in June, 1922 (see Appendix

II), which is summarized in the following

telegram :

90 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

The Secretary of State for the Colonies to

the Officer Administering the Government of

Palestine.

(Telegraphic .) Sent 29 June .

A White Paper will be laid on Saturday, the

ist of July, covering correspondence between

His Majesty's Government and Palestine Arab

Delegation and Zionist Organization, from

21st of February to 23rd of June, 1922 . This

Correspondence includes official statement of

British policy in Palestine, of which summary

follows :

(r) His Majesty's Government re-affirm

Declaration of November, 19117, which is

not susceptible of change .

(2) A Jewish National Home will be

founded in Palestine . The Jewish people will

be in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance.

But His Majesty's Government have

no such aim in view as that Palestine should

become as Jewish as England is English .

(3) Nor do His Majesty's Government

contemplate disappearance or subordination

of Arab population, language, or culture .

(4) Status of all citizens of Palestine will

be Palestinian . No section of population will

have any other status in the eyes of the law.

THE MANDATE 91

(S) His Majesty's Government intend to

foster establishment of full measure of selfgovernment

in Palestine, and as the next step

a Legislative Council with a majority of

elected members will be set up immediately .

(6) Special position of Zionist Executive

does not entitle it to share in any degree in

government of country .

(7) Immigration will not exceed economic

capacity of country at the time to

absorb new arrivals .

(8) Committee of elected members of

Legislative Council will confer with administration

upon matters relating to regulation

of immigration . Any difference of opinion

will be referred to His Majesty's Government.

(9) Any religious community or considerable

section of population claiming that

terms of Mandate are not being fulfilled

will have right of appeal to League of

Nations.

The executive of Zionist Organization have

formally assured His Majesty's Government

that the activities of the Zionist Organization

will be conducted in conformity with policy

set forth in statement . Correspondence will be

92 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

92 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

forwarded by next mail. Meanwhile you may

issue above summary of statement for publication

on Monday, July 3rd .*

Truly, Mr. Churchill denounced "exaggerated

interpretations of the meaning of the Balfour

Declaration" and condemned the use of the

rhetorical phrase that Palestine is to become "as

Jewish as England is English ." The phrase which

was used by Dr . Chaim Weizmann, originally

appeared in an editorial in the London Jewish

Chronicle, on the loth of May, 19211, in the following

form

Hence the real key to the Palestine situation

is to be found in giving to Jews as such, those

rights and privileges in Palestine which shall

enable Jews to make it as Jewish as England is

English or as Canada is Canadian . That is the

only reasonable, or indeed feasible meaning of

a Jewish National Home, and it is impossible

for Jews to construct it without being accorded

a national status for Jews.

It is a fair interpretation of the words used by

Major W. Ormsby-Gore, the Political Officer in

charge of the Zionist Commission on June 17,

* Mr. Churchill's comparison between his White Paper, and Lord

Passfield's White Paper will be found in Appendix VIII, p. z86 .

THE MANDATE

93

1918, at Jaffa, at the first conference of Jews of

the liberated area of Palestine .

Mr. Balfour has made an historic declaration

with regard to the Zionists, that he wishes to

see created and built up in Palestine a National

Home for the Jewish people .

What do we understand by this? We mean

that those Jews who voluntarily come to live in

Palestine should live in Palestine as Jewish nationalists,

i. e., that they should be regarded as

Jews and nothing else . . . You are bound together

in Palestine by the need of building up

a Jewish nation in all its various aspects in

Palestine, a national center for Jewry all over

the world to look at.

The Churchill White Paper was a step down,

not from Jewish claims, but from British promises

and British interpretations of the Declaration . It

was a deflection from the original intentions of

the Declaration. Even so, it stipulated that "the

Jewish people will be in Palestine, as of right and

not on sufferance ."

This formula was a response of Colonial Secretary

Churchill and his first assistant, the permanent

secretary, Sir John E . Shuckburgh, to Arab

protests . An Arab delegation in London, in February,

1922, asked that the British Government :

94 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

revise their present policy in Palestine, end the

Zionist condominium, put a stop to all alien

immigration.

To this and much else, the Colonial Secretary

replied on March 1, 1922 :

Mr. Churchill regrets to observe that his personal

explanations have apparently failed to

convince your Delegations [the Arabs] that

His Majesty's Government have no intention

of repudiating the obligations into which they

have entered toward the Jewish people. . . .

If your Delegation really represents the

present attitude of the majority of the Arab

population of Palestine, and Mr . Churchill has

no grounds for suggesting that this is not the

case, it is quite clear that the creation at this

stage of a National Government would preclude

the fulfilment of the pledge made by the

British Government to the Jewish people .

Immigration is of such vital concern to all

sections of the population, that there are

strong grounds for dealing specially with it, or

for setting up some regular machinery by

which the interests of the existing population

of Palestine should be represented, without the

infusion of any official element .

This fair suggestion as to the handling of immiTHE

MANDATE 95

gration was never acted upon . The immigration

official is a subordinate of the Palestine Administration,

which is the creature of the Colonial

Office in Downing Street. We may be permitted,

in passing, to note how Mr . Ormsby-Gore's fine

words, "those Jews who voluntarily come to live

in Palestine should live in Palestine as Jewish nationalists,"

and Mr . Churchill's more resonant

phrase, "the Jewish people will be in Palestine as

of right and not on sufferance," have translated

themselves in the administrative manipulations

of the Colonial Office .

Can every Jew who so desires enter Palestine?

No.

Can every Jew who is permitted to enter

Palestine settle there? No .

Can all those Jews who settle in Palestine become

Palestinians? Not if they are British subjects

.

The "right and not on sufferance" has its limitations.

The splendid vision of J. Ramsay MacDonald,

"Israel, after many generations, has turned towards

Palestine, as migrating birds obey the call

of the seasons," may not literally apply to English

Jews . They are in a special category in Palestine.

Its citizenship is forbidden them . Nothing

perhaps as clearly illustrates the possessive con9.6

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

cept of Palestine, furtively maintained by the

Colonial Office, as the character of the rights the

Government maintains for British Jews in Palestine,

together with its denial of their right to

co-opt for Palestinian citizenship . Outweighing

the lucubrations of a dozen White Papers is this

simple statement . It is made by a responsible English

Jew who writes of himself and others and

whose position demands that we withhold his

name from publication :

i. As soon as I was qualified to do so, I, a

British born subject, applied for Palestine nationality

to the Palestine Government . In due

course, I surrendered my British passport and

received a Palestinian passport with which I

visited England .

2. Subsequent to my return from that visit,

I received a letter from the Immigration Department

of the Palestine Government, requesting

me to return my Palestine passport

for which the original British passport would

be substituted, this action having been required

by a decision of the Law Officers of the British

Crown.

3 . While hesitating about my action in the

matter, I received a reminder on the subject and

I had no alternative but to surrender my

THE MANDATE

97

Palestinian passport, and a new British document

was issued for which no fee was payable .

I understood from inquiries addressed to the

Legal and Immigration authorities that (a) I

enjoy the rights and privileges both of a

British and of a Palestinian subject, and (b)

that the cancelling of my Palestinian passport

is due to a ruling that a British High Commissioner,

such as is the head of the Palestine Administration,

cannot denationalise a British

subject, but I have nothing in writing to this

effect, the authorities being very reluctant to

make any statement on the subject .

The dual British role exhibited in this letter demands

some elaboration . Year by year since 1919,

British Secretaries of State have affirmed and

reaffirmed Britain's adherence to the principles of

the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate. Mr.

MacDonald says he is loyal to both . Lord Passfield

boasts, we believe, that he moved the original

approving resolution at the Labor Conference,

and therefore, all who believe he is "retreating"

from the express pledge, are mistaken and

misconceive his whole-hearted friendship, benevolence

and loyalty to obligation. Despite all these

assertions the British born Jew is denied his right

to become a Palestinian . A small matter! How

98 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

many British born Jews want to become Palestinians?

Yet here, if we have any understanding

of ethics, we have a palpable measure of that betrayal

of principles of which we complain .

"His Majesty's Government has accepted the

Mandate in respect of Palestine and undertaken

to exercise it on behalf of the League of Nations"

so runs a sentence in the preamble of the Mandate.

Nowhere is it written, nowhere indicated

that the British Government was to exercise it in

the interest of British policies or British selfinterest.

Nowhere is it indicated that the relationship

of a British Jew should be different from that

of any other Jew, American, Russian, Polish or

German. Who has decided otherwise? Not the

League of Nations, nor its Mandates Commission,

nor even the British Government in any public

document.

He who first said "Let the buyer beware"

uttered a byword rather than a proverb . The

buyer is never "aware." The mood of buying is

against this awareness . The code writer who said

every citizen knows the law or must know the

laws of his country was uttering a complete psychological

untruth . No citizen knows the law,

for codes are no part of our consciousness.

Humanity grasps certain moral principles . Lawyers

and judges look into the precise language of

THE MANDATE

99

codes to justify claims of rights or to denounce

infractions of statutes . Man lives by faith-confidence

in the fair and equitable dealing and the

honest intent of his neighbors. That is why a report

is the best hiding place for evidence of public

wrong ; that is why office itself is the best safe

deposit box for concealing the irregularities and

malevolent machinations of bureaucrats .

A high school student passing an examination

in civics is probably the most conscious person as

to the laws, rights, privileges and systems of government

he has been studying. To his teacher it

is all routine text-meaningless words learned by

rote. What does the individual reader know about

the detailed process of government in the municipality

in which he lives? Almost nothing! Examine

any adult in the mechanics of his local

bureaucracy and he will flounder . Yet it is in the

orderly process of papers drawn up, passed along,

signed, reported, sealed, redrawn, the mazes of

the circumlocutory department that a system

grew up, which turned the Balfour Declaration

upside down and led to the present violation of

the Mandate.

Ask Baldwin, Lloyd George or for that matter

Ramsay MacDonald whether they know that the

Law Officers of the Crown have denied an English

Jew the right to become a Palestinian and they

100 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

will, we are certain, honestly admit complete

ignorance of the matter . Zionist officialdom knew

something about it. Zionist officialdom has been

silent. Zionist officialdom is not specifically legally

trained. It has not been drawn from a class of

trained diplomats. It had, moreover, other and

more serious problems to consider than the rights

of a few English Jews . It has been lost for seven

years in the mazes spun by the civil servants

trained in the Colonial Office . Nearly every individual

grievance against the Administration

established in Palestine is petty, even obscure .

The sum total presents a picture, a massing of

blacks against a white background-until in

Lord Passfield's hands the eclipse is complete.

Year by year the British repeated the formula

of loyalty to the Declaration . Year by year the

Palestine Administration reported formally and

with official correctness what it was doing in

Palestine . The routine was perfect. The Mandate

Commission set up its questionnaire in accordance

with article this and article that of the Mandate.

The Mandatory was answerable and did

respond to the solicitous inquiries of the League

of Nations. The law was cited-the law was

obeyed. Every tweedledee corresponded to its

apposite tweedledum . But

VII

THE COLONIAL OFFICE TAKES HOLD

THE Jews in Palestine had grievances . Visitors

to Palestine were complaining . Bills of particulars

were presented at the Zionist Congresses of 1925

and 1927. Bundles of slivers-the whittlings of

Jewish emotion, said the critics,-Zionist critics

of Zionists-Zionist leaders explaining, defending,

vouching for the British Government and the

Palestinian administration . The Zionists had faith

in British official rectitude . They sought to have

faith and to justify their faith-a desired faith

was set up against concrete facts .

What actually happened? When the military

administration ceased and was replaced by a civil

administration, the new force was recruited from

the Colonial Office . It appointed and employed

men, trained in its service, graduated from the

British civil service. The London Times in its

advertising columns has from time to time announced

vacancies in the Palestine Administration.

Nothing could be more orderly and precise

101

102 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

than these announcements . Nothing less obviously

unobjectionable,-except this-Palestine

is not a British possession . The British civil service

code, British preference for British trained men,

graduating in rank in Palestine according to British

colonial ratings, does not of necessity apply to

Palestine .

We shall not enlarge upon the details of this

discrimination against non-British trained men

educated for public service . This mole-hill becomes

a mountain of its own momentum . The

men so selected are, by every disposition and training,

predisposed to Colonial Office routine .

They know from the Mandate that Palestine

is technically not a British possession . But, having

no other concept of government, obviously

theirs is a problem of adjusting conditions to the

technicalities of the Mandate . Since the Dominions

are not administered by it, the inbreeding of

the Colonial Office has hardened . The Colonial

Office administers in detail the Crown Colonies,-

lands England owns, in which "natives" live . The

Palestine Administration, High Commissioner,

Attorney General, Civil Secretary were given the

Crown Colony Code by which to guide their

acts. The leash that holds them is the cable to

Downing Street.

It would have been an exception to the whole

THE COLONIAL OFFICE 103

current of human experience if British Colonial

Office trained men thought of Palestine in terms

other than that of a Crown Colony . As they

thought, so they acted . Whatever their predispositions

towards the Jews, whatever flutterings

of emotion were stirred in their breasts, when

they reflected that they were to help rule in Zion

and aid in its restoration, they, soon after settlement

in Palestine, learned to dislike the Jews, and

to despise the Mandate. Few of the men who have

served in Palestine have sympathized with the

Balfour Declaration . Privately, Englishmen admit

this. So have the officials in Palestine, in

mutual criticism over the tea cups. To those who

seek objectivity, this is perfectly natural .

The British Crown Colony system, with its

reference of every important and even trivial

matter to London, is only practical and applicable

in a community of Englishmen attached to

the Motherland and in the colony principally for

business, or official and professional reasons, surrounded

by "natives," that term that so curiously

designates those who can be cuffed, kicked,

or ordered into silence. "Natives" have all life

before them . They are a leisurely, easily subdued

and quickly satisfied element of humanity. Or

officialdom thinks so.

In Palestine, from the point of view of official104

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

dom, there has settled the most objectionable class

that has ever tried its patience,-Jews . Jews who

come into Palestine feeling in sober truth that

they have come Home. They make up, what

Ramsay MacDonald has so eloquently described,

as "an immigration of the longing ones ." Jews

who come "of right and not on sufferance," Jews

who know not this word "native" as applied to

themselves or others. Jews who are culturally the

equals and even the betters of the civil staff. Jews

who bring either means or capacity or both with

them! Lastly, Jews who from the moment when

landing at Jaff a, they kiss the sands, eyes filled

with the tears of hope, strive to do their all towards

the upbuilding of the Jewish National

Home. Men and women who think and dream .

Hatikvah * is not in the text book of the

schools that train British Colonial officials .

We have still to deal with the fine spun words

which seek to prove that black is white, that the

bottom is the top ; a proviso the controlling

clause ; and a preamble meaningless . We shall

show that "the letter killeth"-but it is still more

true that the spirit slayeth . For eight years the

Jews have struggled to achieve in Palestine . Every

day of those eight years officialdom has found

means of retardation, procrastination, of turning

* The Jewish National Hymn "The Hope ."

THE COLONIAL OFFICE 105

the Jewish dream into a Penelope robe . What was

woven in the day was unraveled in the night.

Is our view that Lord Passfield's policy is

merely the end of the process of strangulation in

which British officialdom has indulged from the

beginning a myth, the reaction of a sort of racial

paranoia? Let us see!

The struggle between the Zionist officials who

constituted the Zionist Commission, a body sent

to Palestine by the advice of the Government in

19 18, and the military governing Palestine in

1919-20, was discussed at the London Zionist

Conference in July, 1920.

From 1918 to September, 1922, C. R. Ashbee,

M.A., held the office of Civic Advisor to

the City of Jerusalem. Subsequently Mr . Ashbee

wrote "A Palestine Notebook" (New York,

1923) . Mr. Ashbee frankly dislikes the Jews, detests

Zionism and all its woi :.... A few excerpts

with dates are illuminative .

July S, 1918.

The Jews don't like it . They think the new

Jerusalem belongs to them . But we don't take

that view.

July 24, 19 1 9-

Today the Zionists inaugurated their new

university on Mount Scopus . . . But it's we

io6 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

Protestants with our dear old English Bible who

really remember Ezra, not they .

September, 1918 .

(The Balfour Declaration was ten months

old.)

What is to be done with this country after

the war, and who is going to have the say? The

constructive people out here? The idealistic

Democracy at home? The Zionists??

January, 1919.

(Ashbee reflecting on a talk with Lord Curzon

at the Foreign Office .)

And as for Zionists? I went away with the

thought that there might be some Jewish State

-later perhaps. Not yet.

I have not met one Zionist yet whom I

would really trust for a wise and sane constructive

policy . . . the Jew is unthinkable without

the bargain, he bears the brand of that

mean fellow Jacob upon his brow.

Tiberias, March 20, 1920.

Dealing with the need for Israel in Palestine .

All this finer life the Jew has built up for himself,

there has been nothing to do with political

Zionism. It is threatened with one danger only,

political Zionism may destroy it.

THE COLONIAL OFFICE 107

Jerusalem, December, 1919 .

Your Zionist does not realise that Islam has

accomplished what Judaism failed to do-to

establish in the peoples of Western Asia the

idea of the unity of God . Perhaps of political

Zionism they might even have approved the

summing up of a brilliant French Jewess ; "Le

sionisme, enfin c'est une blague."

And here is the sum total of the Ashbee philosophy

written in 1923 :

The policy of the Balfour Declaration is an

unjust policy and Zionism as understood and

as sometimes practised in Palestine is based

upon a fundamental injustice and therefore

dangerous both to civilisation and to Jewry.

Mr. Ashbee was frank . We do not propose to

argue his views, though his dislike of the Jews

was basically that he wished to create a Gothic

hand-work guild-craft life in Palestine . He represents

in the main the men who have served England

in Palestine since 1918. They are publicly

reticent.

Mr. Harry Charles Luke (who in 1913, in

Sierra Leone, was according to his book, "Fringe

of the East," Harry Charles Joseph Lukach,

the official most prominent in the riots of

io8 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

1929), managed in 1927 to write "Prophets,

Priests and Patriarchs, sketches of the sects of

Palestine" in which he wholly ignores the Jews .

Together with Mr . Keith Roach, another official,

he wrote "Handbook for Palestine," which by

its scanty attentiyfn to the Jews betrays indifference

to, if not dislike of the Jews. Name after

name occurs to us but they are all strange to the

reader. He must assume that the majority of the

Jews in Palestine freely discuss the unsympathetic

attitude of all but four of the British

officials who are or have been in Palestine since

1918 . One of the exceptions is Lord Plumer, who

for some years was High Commissioner, another

Sir Wyndham Deedes .

Over and over again in Zionist circles there has

been discussed this need of Britain being represented

in Palestine by men sympathetic to the

Mandate and its purpose. It is not in the blood of

Colonial Office men to approve the Mandate.

They must rule not cooperate with people. They

must according to their creed dislike the Jew in

Palestine . They feel their "rights ." They are there

because of the "natives ." They can like the Arabs .

For though the latter protest against the presence

of the British in Palestine, oppose the Balfour

Declaration and the Mandate, the upper classes

can be "managed," the lower classes repressed .

THE COLONIAL OFFICE 109

From the viewpoint of Colonial officialdom, the

Jew is the "undesirable alien ."

Yet we feel obliged to trace some of the acts

which destroy and have been destroying the

Jewish National Home and which in their totality

make of Palestine a British Crown Colony, not in

name but in fact. We merely select a few typical

instances.

1 . Jews born in Palestine and immigrants holding

public office are not permitted to cooperate

financially or as a matter of formal association in

the development of the country . A judge was denied

the right to participate in what was hoped

would be an important financial institution for

issuing mortgages and bonds on Jewish property

in Palestine. The reason assigned was the Crown

Colony Code.

2 . Another official was denied the right to aid

in the development of so unlucrative a venture

as the Hebrew Opera Company . The reason

assigned was the Crown Colony Code .

3 . The plans for a hotel in Jerusalem had, we

were told in 1925, not only to be submitted to

the Department of Public Works, but that department

had to refer the plans and specifications

to London . Yet Jerusalem is a municipality in

which voters elect the Mayor and Council, etc .

4. The Palestine Immigration Office controls

IIO THE GREAT BETRAYAL

the visas issued to would-be settlers, including

Americans, who apply to the British Consulate in

New York City. "Of right and not on sufferance"

is not known as principle or practice in the matter

of passports . The conditions of settlement are

onerous.

S . Vladimir Jabotinsky, though a Jew and the

recruiting officer and inspirer of the British

and Palestine Jewish Legions that fought under

Allenby, has been denied admission to Palestine

because he has views on the policy Zionists should

pursue in achieving the Jewish National Home .

He is not "suffered" by the Mandatory Administration.

6. All the concessions for Palestine are matters

for negotiation with the London Agents for the

Crown. What rights the Crown Agents have in

a mandated area have never been made clear .

7. The Palestine Administration has consistently

made difficulties for the development of

textile industries in Palestine. We have no opinion

as to the merits of these projects . We believe Jews

have a right if they choose so to do to lose money

in Palestine in the manufacture of cotton goods .

To lose money should at least be "of right" but

the British will not "suffer" it-in the interests

of Manchester . That is why Sir John Hope Simpson

goes out of his way, in his report, to oppose

THE COLONIAL OFFICE III

textile industries. This decision, like many others

designed to regulate the industrial life of a people,

could only occur to those who feel they are, in

possession.

8. Palestine pays for the upkeep of the military

railway in the Sinai Peninsula-that is, on territory

which is not part of Palestine and a road in

which Palestinians have not the slightest interest .

9. The whole of the duties on imports though

grudgingly and slowly changing, are conceived

not from the point of view of a newly developing

country that needs cheap construction material,

but from the point of credit budget and a payroll

for imported British officials . Arabs and Jews

according to their own systems have for centuries

been running schools. There are only a handful of

British children in Palestine, but Palestine pays

for British school inspectors. This is the smallest

item in a bureaucracy established to govern less

than a million people, many of whom are nomads

and the vast majority of whom do not know the

English language which British officialdom

stamps on everything and demands everywhere .

Viewed from the heights there is something

picayunish and small-minded in the setting forth

of these grievances and, such others as the discrimination

practiced against Jews in the government

service, etc. We agree. From our point of

112 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

view the fact that such difficulties have been discussed

in the Political Commission of the Zionist

Congresses, that Zionist officials have had to devote

themselves to the righting-with no great

success-of all these minor wrongs, is part of the

serious evil that has grown up with "the Great

Adventure." The worst phase of it, however, is

that, step by step, in order to justify the policy,

it has led to a betrayal of the principles of the

Mandate. In mathematics the whole is no greater

than its parts. In life the sum total of any group

of experiences is something different from its incidents.

How far the slant of things can mislead

is shown by the fact that in England the presence

of so many British officials in Palestine prior to

the disturbances suggested that the British taxpayer

is carrying the burden of a new type of

imperialism for the benefit of Jews.

We shall waste neither time nor space dissecting

budgets in order to disprove this. A few quotations

from official sources (the italics are ours)

will set the minds of most people at rest . Says the

"Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances

of August, 1929 " - the celebrated

Shaw Report : (page 19)

Ignoring adjustments . . . such as the cost

of redeeming the share of the Ottoman Public

Debt allocated to Palestine and the repayment

THE COLONIAL OFFICE 113

of certain sums due His Majesty's Government,

the expenditure of the Palestine government

during the period of 1925-28 averaged £2,27S,-

ooo per annum. By far the heaviest item of

expenditure is that incurred on military and

security forces, the charge for which (including

prisons) amounted in 1928 to £536,713 .

Quite a share of this expenditure for "military

and security forces" of course goes to British

officials and British soldiers . But the report continues:

(p. 19-20)

The financial record of the Government of

Palestine is one of which any administration

would have good reason to be proud . In the

early years of the Administration, revenue

barely balanced expenditure, although at that

time the whole of the cost of the maintenance

of military units in Palestine was defrayed by

His Majesty's Government and-between 1922

and 1926-the cost of the British Gendarmerie

was borne from a grant-in-aid by His

Majesty's Government . In more recent years

the Palestine Government accumulated large

surplus funds, the greater part of which they

have utilized for extinguishing by purchase

the share of the Ottoman Public Debt allocated

to the country by the Treaty of Lau114

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

sanne. They have repaid to His Majesty's Government-

partly out of loan funds and partly

out of revenue-sums approaching a total of

£i,foo,ooo ; they have defrayed five-sixths of

the cost of the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force, a

military unit raised locally and intended for

the common defence of Palestine and Trans-

Jordan, and since the 1st of April, 1927, they

have repaid to His Majesty's Government the

amounts by which the cost o f the British forces

stationed in Palestine and Trans-Jordan have

exceeded the cost of those forces when stationed

in Great Britain .

"Out of the eater came forth meat, out of the

strong came forth sweet ." The Samsonic riddle

applies. One more quotation : (page 20)

For the first few years of the British administration,

Palestine was a burden on the British

Exchequer in the same manner and to much

the same degree as almost every country newly

brought under British rule has at first been a

burden. But Palestine has now repaid her debts

to His Majesty's Government on a scale which

at least compares favourably with that obtained

from any other debtor country and she

now meets from revenue all the current charges

THE COLONIAL OFFICE IIS

that can fairly be made against her by His

Majesty's Government.

The Jew pays. The Jew has paid and he continues

to pay . He is the financier of a government

that despises him and opposes him, and violates

the contract made with him .

At the moment in which this book is being prepared

for the press, when the operation of the

proposed White Paper looms seriously in Palestine,

while the Jews protest against a breach of

honor, the Arabs, according to accredited reports,

are throwing their lands on the market . The

price of land in Palestine has dropped steadily

since the 1929 riots. Liberals who saw Jewish

effort in Palestine as something unethical and

therefore rushed to the support of a constitutional

panacea, which would adjust the Arab-

Jewish problem, have made no attempt to understand

that, while the Arabs are striking at the

British over the backs of the Jews, they have not

the remotest intention of paying the price of

British administration. So confronted by a policy

which will check immigration and at the same

time prevent the sale of lands, Arabs are flooding

the market with offers of property . They want

to be forehanded and cash in . That fact, we believe,

puts a different complexion on the inwardness

of what is really afoot in Palestine .

116 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

Nor is there anything new in this combination

of protest and a desire for customers . The Palestine

Administration in i 921 passed a Land

Transfer Ordinance of which Section s reads:

(i) Any person wishing to make a disposition

of immovable property must first obtain

the consent of the Government .

This ordinance failed to operate, as Dr . Drum

mond Shiels laconically told the Permanent Mandates

Commission, because : (page 63)

These sub-sections had not always been

popular with Arabs who wished to sell land .

One obvious reason-apart from the fear of the

loss of customers-is that the Arab does not wish

to pay the taxes that modern administration demands.

The London Nation and Athenaeum

(October 25, 1930), which describes the British

policy as a "curious picture of timidity and

truculence," has this to say of the prospective

outcome of the proposed policy :

It is not difficult to foresee the future course

of events if . . . Palestine is left with a

steadily increasing Arab population and a stationary

Jewish settlement unable and unwilling

to invest money in any future development.

The present cadre of British officials,

THE COLONIAL OFFICE 117

which it is now proposed to enlarge, is absurdly

expensive for an Asiatic country with a population

about one-twentieth of that of an

Indian Province . . .

In a very literal sense, therefore, Great Britain

is in Palestine by reason of the Jewish National

'Home. Withdraw the Jews who are the principal

taxpayers and the administrative structure falls

for lack of income .

W,

THE LEAGUE TAKES HOLD

ALTHOUGH not so intended, the MacDonald

Government has by its proposed Palestine policy

rendered one useful service, that of calling attention

to the twist given the Mandatory system .

The practicability of entrusting an area and its

population to one of the great powers may now

be scoffed at, but there can be no question that

in the spell of high idealism that moved the

world at the opening of the Peace Conference

there existed a belief that the policy of imperial

expansion could be thwarted, and that the

League of Nations could serve as that court of

the conscience of mankind before which subject

peoples could bring their grievances and be

dealt with in equity and justice . The variations in

the three types of Mandates, the insertion in the

Mandate for Palestine of a preamble which

should justify the presence in the country of a

Mandatory that would facilitate the establishment

of the Jewish National Home, the creation

II$

LEAGUE TAKES HOLD 119

of the Permanent Mandates Commission, all point

to the fact that there existed an intent to do

something new in the government of the lesser

peoples. So far the Mandatory has failed the system

of its own devising .

The fault is not with the League of Nations

nor yet with its excellent institution, the Permanent

Mandates Commission. There is comfort

for the oppressed and the tried in the fact that

within its ample reports-which only attract the

attention of the professionally interested-there

is evidence that not a single protest, however obscure,

goes unnoticed . The trouble is that the

Commission lacks independent observers in the

Mandated territories and that its authority is

limited to criticism based on paper reports . Its

difficulties are fully demonstrated in a single sentence

employed by M. Van Rees : (page 83)

It must not be forgotten that, during its

previous session, the Mandates Commission had

not had at its disposal such abundant information

as was now available, thanks to the Shaw

Report and the documentation from all kinds

of sources which it had called forth.

The man in the street, and for that matter the

opinion-creating editors of our great dailies, are

not particularly mindful, in discussing this Pales120

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

tine problem, that its Mandate comes under class

A and that the British admittedly have operated

it as a class B Mandate * or that the terms of the

Mandate were handed to the League of Nations

by the British who devised their own basic

law for the country, excluding from the Order

in Council which created the form of administration

such parts of the Mandate as did not conform

with the favorite form of phraseology

adopted by British legal draftsmen . What boots

all this? That an immense mass of semi-legal and

diplomatic verbiage is created, obscuring and befuddling

everything!

The disingenuousness of the whole business is

appalling. Here is a Mandate drawn up by the

English Government which in the words of Lord

Curzon, then Foreign Secretary, was to establish :

A place where the Jews could be assembled

as a nation, and where they could enjoy the

privileges of an independent national existence.'

Into that Mandate the British wrote such an

apparently convincing and simple sentence as

this: (Clause 2)

Dr. Drummond Shiels, before the Permanent Mandates Commission

Report, page 45-

t Life of Lord Curzon, by Earl Ronaldshay, Vol. III, p . s 6.

LEAGUE TAKES HOLD 121

The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing

the country under such political, administrative

and economic conditions as will secure

the establishment of the Jewish National Home,

as laid down in the preamble, and the development

of self-governing institutions, and also

for safeguarding the civil and religious rights

of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective

of race and religion .

Then the government proceeded to place

Palestine under the Colonial Office, so that the

land, its laws and even its finances are administered,

directed and controlled by British imperialists

. These gentlemen write all the codes,

ordinances, regulations, and rules . Then, calmly,

with great legal circumspection and all the mass

of turgid verbosity which documents demand,

they explain that under this code of their own

devising they cannot do this, that or the other . To

one bent upon moral ideals, a reading of the minutes

of the Seventeenth (Extraordinary) Session

of the Permanent Mandates Commission held

at Geneva on June 2 to 21, 1930 to discuss the

Palestine problem in all its phases, is heartbreaking,

notwithstanding the fact that the

document contains perhaps the ablest statement

of the Zionist case by a non-Jew, and impresses

122 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

one with the obvious justification for all the

complaints of the Jews.

For here we have the Permanent Mandates

Commission, fulfilling that function which seems

to us the great justification for the existence of

the League of Nations as supervisor of the conduct

of Mandatory Powers . Here we have the

British Empire, great England through its "accredited

representatives," using the language of

self-complacency, of smug self-satisfaction, of

beclouding phraseology, of avoidance and of

evasion. The "accredited representatives" speak

as though by some unforeseen accident England

had gotten into Palestine, and then found itself

inextricably mixed up with a "bunch of Arabs

and Jews,"-none of whom knew what was good

for themselves-and out of a benign interest in

the public welfare, as part of the unspoken "white

man's burden," it was doing all it could for these

poor devils .

Not a word of British forthrightness in the

British statements. Quibble and more quibble! We

must -make an exception . In school-boy language

the Commission "rapped the British over the

knuckles" for its policy and method of administration

in Palestine . On August 2nd Arthur Henderson,

Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs,

LEAGUE TAKES HOLD 123

replied to the Commission at length . He did say

what every man can understand-

. . . The report contains various charges,

the substance of which would appear to be

that the Mandatory Power has failed in important

respects, to carry out the Mandate .

In taking this view, the Mandates Commission

appear to have accepted the more extreme

Jewish contentions regarding the meaning and

object of the Mandate . The duty imposed upon

the Mandatory Power is not to establish the

Jewish National Home in Palestine . This is

the function of the Jews themselves, directed

by the Jewish Agency . . . .

The further charge that His Majesty's Government

have failed in their Mandatory obligations

vis-a-vis the Arabs by neglect of agricultural

and other development is one which His

Majesty's Government feel they must deal

with at greater length. The Mandates Commission

seem to imply that a proper development

policy would have so increased the general

productivity, prosperity and contentment

of the population as to reconcile the Arab section

of the community to a progressively increasing

inflow of Jewish immigrants . . .

(page 152)

124 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

This passivity towards the Jewish development

evidently is the official connotation of

the word "facilitate" in the Balfour Declaration.

Nevertheless we are° grateful to Mr. Henderson.

We, who admire the British people, who still

have faith in their desire to do right and act

justly, are trying to understand the British Government,

which, in all this business, is nothing

but a cloak for the Colonial Office . We understand

from Mr. Henderson and the Shaw Report

that there are three degrees of "extremeness"

with regard to the Balfour Declaration. The London

Jewish Chronicle is extreme because it

stresses Jewish National in the phrase Jewish

National Home ; Vladimir Jabotinsky is extreme

because he stresses Home in the sentence ; and

all other Zionists are extreme because they believe

Great Britain has distinct obligations towards

the development of the Jewish National

Home.

Mr. Henderson, however, was not "playing

cricket." He hit back because the Permanent

Mandates Commission had said in paragraph six

of its summation : (page 142)

The Jewish National Home, so far as it has

been established, has in practise been the work

LEAGUE TAKES HOLD 125

of the Jewish organisation. The Mandate

seemed to offer other prospects to Jews. It

must be recognised that their charge against

the Palestine Government that it has not fulfilled,

by actual deeds, the obligation to encourage

the establishment of the National

Home, has been notably reinforced by the fact

that the government has shown itself unable

to provide the essential condition for the development

of the Jewish National Homesecurity

for persons and property.

But the British Government became far more

excited because the Commission dealt at length

with Parliamentary Under-Secretary Dr . T.

Drummond Shiels' statements to it and thus came

to some pertinent conclusions which we venture

to suggest are the cause of the Passfield-Ramsay

MacDonald inversions of the Mandate objectives .

We reproduce this section of the report in extenso,

even to its paragraphing :

"This firm intention on the part of the

Mandatory to carry out the Mandate in all its

provisions was again strikingly asserted in a

speech by the Prime Minister in the House of

Commons on April 3, 193o . The Mandates

Commission particularly notes the following

statements in this speech, an extract from

126 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

which appears at the head of the White Paper

of May, 1930 :

`His Majesty's Government will continue

to administer Palestine in accordance with

the terms of the Mandate as approved by

the Council of the League of Nations . That

is an international obligation from which

there can be no question of receding .

`Under the terms of the Mandate His

Majesty's Government are responsible for

promoting "the establishment in Palestine

of a National Home for the Jewish people,

it being clearly understood that nothing

shall be done which might 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."

`A double undertaking is involved, to the

Jewish people on the one hand, and to the

non-Jewish population of Palestine on the

other ; and it is the firm resolve of His

Majesty's Government to give effect, in

equal measure, to both parts of the declaration,

and to do equal justice to all sections

of the population of Palestine . That is a

duty from which they will not shrink, and

LEAGUE TAKES HOLD 127

to the discharge of which they will apply all

the resources at their command . . . .'

"At the Extraordinary Session, the accredited

representative of Palestine in the Commission

used language no less specific . In his

first statement on June 3rd, Dr . Drummond

Shiels said :

`We are committed not only to the establishment

in Palestine of a National Home

for the Jewish people, but also to the preservation

of the civil and religious rights

of the non-Jewish communities in the

country. It is sometimes said that the two

parts of this obligation are irreconcilable .

We believe that they can be reconciled, and

must be reconciled .'

"Again, in the course of his final statement

to the Commission on June 9th, the accredited

representative said :

`We do not consider that the events of

last August-deeply regrettable as we feel

them to be-prove that the general lines of

our Palestine policy are wrong, or require

revision. . . . We are, from our experience,

fully aware of the difficulties inherent in the

Mandate. I have already stated that we do

1128 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

not believe that these difficulties are insuperable,

but that they can and must be overcome.'

"From all these statements, two assertions

emerge which should ' be emphasised :

` (i) That the obligations laid down by

the Mandate in regard to the two sections

of the population are of equal weight .

' (2) That the two obligations imposed

on the Mandatory are in no sense irreconcilable.'

"The Mandates Commission has no objection

to raise to these two assertions, which, in

its view, accurately expresses what it conceives

to be the essence of the Mandate for Palestine,

and ensure its future .

"The Commission is, however, of opinion

that, in the interest of the restoration of a

peaceful atmosphere in Palestine, the time has

come to define the legal foundation of the

first of these assertions .

"In the Commission's view, interpretations

of the Palestine Mandate have too often confused

two quite separate matters, namely :

`The objects of the Mandate'-and-

'The immediate obligations of the Mandatory.'

LEAGUE TAKES HOLD 129

"Considering only those clauses of the Mandate

which form virtually the whole subject

of the controversy, the objects o f the Mandate

are:

`The establishment of the Jewish National

Home.

`The establishment of self-governing institutions.'

"The Mandate fixes no time-limit for the

accomplishment of these objects, which is only

common sense, because the event will depend

on numerous circumstances over which the

Mandatory has no control. Even the most

energetic action and the employment of immense

financial resources cannot alone achieve

the establishment of the Jewish National

Home, which is dependent upon economic

factors ; and no political guidance, however

enlightened and however effective, can develop,

except in process of time, that political

maturity without which the winning of complete

de jure independence by a people is a

mere illusion.

"The immediate obligation of the Mandatory

is defined in the Mandate in the following

terms :

130 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

` (z) Placing the country under such

. . . conditions as will secure the establishment

of the Jewish National Home.

'(2) (Placing the country under such

conditions as will secure) the development

of self-governing institutions.'

"Between the two terms of this obligation

the Mandate recognises no primacy in order

of importance and no priority in order of execution.

"It would be unfair to make it a complaint

against the Mandatory that eight years after

the entry into force of the Mandate, Palestine

has not yet been granted a regime of selfgovernment

; and it would be equally unfair to

reproach the Mandatory because the Jewish

National Home has not yet reached its full

development. Those are the objects of the

Mandate, and it is not one of the Mandatory's

obligations to bring them to immediate completion.

The Mandatory's immediate obligation

is solely to create and maintain in Palestine

general conditions favourable to the

gradual accomplishment of the two objects of

the Mandate ."

* League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission, Minutes of the

Seventeenth Session, Geneva, 1930, P . '44 - S .

LEAGUE TAKES HOLD 131

It is true that the Palestine Order-in-Council

issued on September 1, 1922, setting up a Government

in Palestine, was technically a child of

the British Foreign Jurisdiction Act, but it is

equally true that the code applied in Palestine in

spirit, letter and manner is that of the possessive

Crown Colony system .

The whole issue as it has suddenly presented itself

to the public mind, turns upon a Passfieldian

purblindness, which Mr. MacDonald in his statement

(already quoted) has also adopted. In the

White Paper it is thus set forth :

Attempts have been made to argue in support

of Zionist claims that the principal feature

of the Mandate is the passage regarding

the Jewish National Home and that the passages

designed to safeguard the rights of the

non-Jewish community are merely secondary

considerations qualifying to some extent what

is claimed to be the primary object for which

the Mandate has been framed .

This is a conception which His Majesty's

Government have always regarded as totally

erroneous.

This is the climax of all the administrative acts

leading to the Great Betrayal . It is this disingenuous,

unfair, unfaithful and wilful misinterpreta132

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

tion of the objects of the Mandate, which dictates

the policy proposing to clamp down and crush

the great Jewish effort .

The shape of the wards in the key, the weight

of the tumblers in the lock are in themselves interesting-

but the great all-impelling motive for

protest is that, by inverting the reasons for the

Mandate, the present Labor Government flaunts

the truth and is recreant to British honor .

To avoid the semblance of Zionist hypersensitiveness,

we turn to the London New Statesman

(October 25, 1930) for a British review of this

British Government policy .

If their policy is indeed right, if what they

propose in the White Paper is the best they

can do, then not only Jews, but a great many

Gentiles as well, must feel a profound disappointment.

For the policy, stripped of all its

trimmings, means at best a deplorable set-back

to the experiment in Palestine and at worst an

admission that the experiment is hopeless .

We have already made it clear that the conditions

of Palestine were fully familiar to the

British at every stage of the formulation of the

Balfour Declaration and the issuance of the

Mandate. But in further proof of this we quote

the Arab grievances as summarized by British

LEAGUE TAKES HOLD 133

officials in the Report of the Commission of Inquiry

into the Disturbances in May 1921 : (page

51) ,

(a) That Great Britain, when she took over

the administration of Palestine, was led

by the Zionists to adopt a policy

mainly directed towards the establishment

of a National Home for the Jews,

and not to equal benefit of all Palestinians.

(b) That in pursuance of this policy the

Government of Palestine has, as its official

advisory body, a Zionist Commission,

bound by its ideals and its conception

of its role to regard Jewish

interests before all others, and constituted

by its singular prerogatives

into an imperium in imperio .

(c) That there is an undue proportion of

Jews in the Government service .

(d) That a part of the programme of the

Zionists is the flooding of Palestine

with a people which possesses greater

commercial and organizing ability than

the Arabs, and will eventually obtain

the upper hand over the rest of the

population.

134 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

(e) That the immigrants are an economic

danger to the population because of

their competition, and because they

are favoured in this competition .

(f) That immigrant Jews offend by their arrogance

and by their contempt of Arab

social prejudices .

(g) That owing to insufficient precautions

immigrants of Bolshevik tendencies

have been allowed to enter the country,

and that these persons have endeavoured

to introduce social strife and

economic unrest into Palestine and to

propagate Bolshevik doctrines .

In explanation of (c), the report continues :

"The Arabs urge that the Legal Secretary is a

Jew well known as an ardent exponent of Zionism."

As the f act still applies we assume this

grievance also still stands . The Arabs, except

for raising the Wailing Wall issue, have been

unwavering in their protests both as to tbie

character of their grievances and in their opposition

to the existence of the Balfour Declaration.

The report of 1921 resulted in the

Churchill White Paper and the whittling down

of Jewish rights . The August, 1929 riots resulted

in the Shaw Commission which laid the

LEAGUE TAKES HOLD 135

foundation for this new White Paper . That report

said: (page 142) "There is . . . an urgent

need for a statement of policy which should be

expressed in the clearest terms," and added :

It is indeed, in our view, desirable that the

position should be defined still more clearly.

Both the Zionist Organization and the Palestine

Zionist Executive, as is not unnatural,

tend to construe in the widest possible sense

the advisory and other functions assigned to

them by Article 4 of the Mandate for Palestine.

That was the preliminary . The next step was

to send out Sir John Hope Simpson to draft a report

that would agree with the contentions

manifest in the graph we reproduce (page 87) .

The inversion, administratively proposed, was

buttressed by inverting the Balfour Declaration

and ignoring its preamble as well as that of the

Mandate. All of this was foreshadowed in the

Shaw Report. Mr. MacDonald has not acted in

haste, nor Lord Passfield impetuously . The Shaw

Report was issued in March and then not hurriedly.

The case was set forth clearly in that report

(Chapter XI, pages 13 6-7) .

After quoting from the preamble to the Balfour

Declaration its "sympathy with Jewish

136 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

Zionist aspiration," it proceeds to consider if

these words "in Lord Balfour's letter can have

no other meaning than that, when they authorised

the issue of the Declaration, His Majesty's

Government intended to associate themselves

with Zionist aspirations" : (page 136)

If such an argument is well founded and all

the implications which follow from it are accepted,

the intention of the Balfour Declaration

would be clear beyond question and administration

carried out under the Mandate

would presumably be guided by that intention.

Looking back to Balfour's, Curzon's and

other interpretations, which have already been

cited, there can be no question that the intent

was in the preamble. But says the report :

Read the whole Declaration how you will

it is a guarded statement . But it may be read

in two ways .

Was it intended to be read in two ways? Is

not that a suggestion of duplicity and intentional

casuistry the gravest ever publicly made

by a Government Commission to its own Government?

The thing is almost unimaginable . But

the report runs smoothly on : (page 137)

LEAGUE TAKES HOLD 137

Upon one construction the second aspect of

the policy-the maintenance of the Arab and

religious rights of the existing non-Jewish

communities in Palestine-is an overriding

condition, on the absolute fulfillment of which

every active step in the creative aspect of the

policy is to be contingent. But upon another

construction the first aspect of the policy

takes precedence, there would be a binding

obligation on His Majesty's Government to

pave and prepare the way for the establishment

of a Jewish National Home in Palestine

and the second aspect of the policy would be

of minor consideration . Between these two

constructions there lie a wide variety of interpretations

depending only on the degree of importance

which is attached to the two aspects

of the Declaration.

For these sentences we give thanks. They are

the most frank and simple that have come from

Colonial Office pens. They remind us of the street

vendor's pretended impersonality in offering his

wares-"Yer pays yer money and yer takes yer

choice." Yet even he would barely venture to

say "upon one construction the second aspect of

the policy . . . is an overriding condition ."

Such casuistry is not for the common man . He

138 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

could not with equanimity maintain "upon another

construction the first aspect of the policy

takes precedence."

The Shaw Commission told the British Government

that the Balfour Declaration could if

necessary be read backward as well as forward .

By its discussion and its graphs on immigration,

it moreover showed the British Government how

the Jewish National Home could be checkmated,

"crystallized" or paralyzed-these words

in this case all have the same meaning . This statement

of policy, by inverting the Declaration,

was to provide the public justification for a

monstrous act of public betrayal. Such an inversion

was not anticipated when Lord Balfour,

Mr. Lloyd George and General Smuts last December

addressed a remonstrance to the British

Government on its failure to maintain public

order in Palestine in 1929.* It had not been anticipated

by the Premier in the assurances he gave

the Council of the League of Nations immediately

after the riots, nor when in October, 1929

he spoke reassuring words in New York to an

American Jewish delegation. In fact there was

considerable gossip in London and in the United

States, that what became the Shaw Commission

would be headed by General Jan Smuts. The riots

* See Appendix V, p . 219.

LEAGUE TAKES HOLD 139

provoked a storm of indignation. There was no

mincing the suspicion that British officials in

Palestine had connived at the outbreak, which,

however, so ran the thought, went beyond their

discreet desire to expose the impossibility of the

Jewish National Home. It became necessary in

Colonial Office interests to "whitewash" British

Colonial officialdom. That would be best accomplished

by secret sessions as in 19zi, for the official

report of those riots has never been made

public.

Pressure forced a compromise . Some sittings

were held in public ; some in camera . Several important

facts leaked out . i-The Grand Mufti

had been convicted in the 19zi riots and exiled .

2-He was on the Palestine Police black list . 3-

He was in virtue of his office, which is not a

purely ecclesiastical office, on the British payroll .

4-While the Shaw Commission treated him as

some great religious potentate, the equivalent

of a Pope, Mr . Luke as Acting Governor of Palestine

admitted that, prior to the inquiry, he had

not treated him with such distinguished courtesy,

but had sent for him as for any subordinate . 5-

That prior to the riots, High Commissioner

Chancellor had been carrying on negotiations

with the Arab Executive, was to an extent compromised

and after the storm broke withdrew

from his engagements with great formality.

140 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

A smoke screen was provided immediately

after the riots by a virulent pro-Arab agitation

in England and in the United States, conducted

mostly by Syrian Christians financed by non-

Moslems. A typical intriguer named St . John

Philby, now a convert to Islam, appeared

in Jerusalem, ostensibly representing the non-

Palestinian Arabs, with a plan to put an end to

the whole issue by the creation of a constitutional

assembly-a legal way, if enacted, of "crystallizing"

the Jewish National Home . Sentimentalism

stirred sympathy everywhere for this panacea.

But the Jews, save for a handful of innate

compromisers, would none of it . The Shaw Commission

had therefore to go on . It exceeded its

instructions in order to provide the basis for a

new policy. Its findings met with dissent from

its one non-legal member, Harry Snell. There

was a clamor for the publication of the evidence

on which the Commission purported to base its

report. The Colonial Office began to fumble . It

was still explaining why it had not printed the

evidence, when the matter came before the

Permanent Mandates Commission in June. Even

then it withheld the evidence given in camera on

grounds suggesting that England was afraid of

an attack in Palestine by some foreign power .

The Permanent Mandates Commission was

LEAGUE TAKES HOLD 141

scornful of the excuse and it went searchingly

into what was before it . Its members, men of experience

in colonial administration in various

parts of the world, declined to accept Dr . Drummond

Shiels' or Mr . Luke's superficial but wordy

explanations of what had happened or why it

had happened in Palestine. This attitude was in

no way anticipated by the Colonial Office . Dr.

Shiels was repeatedly pressed to state whether,

in view of the situation, the Mandatory Power

proposed to pursue a new policy . He had to justify

the Premier's statement to the League Assembly

on September 3, 1929 :

There is no racial conflict in what happened

in Palestine the other day . . . there

is no conflict between Jews and Arabs .

And to the Shaw Report's statement that the

racial conflict dominated the situation . Dr.

Shiels answered that :

Mr. MacDonald speaking immediately after

the disturbances had not the advantage of

knowledge that subsequently became available .

Dr. Shiels on the question of a new policy answered

over and over again that no new policy

was intended. He had the official plausible interpretation

of the "suspension of immigration ."

142 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

He was certain that there was no fundamental

change in prospect . All the large problems were

pushed back. Decision had to await Sir John

Hope Simpson's report . The Mandates Commission

was not deeply impressed . It listened to Dr .

Shiels who interpreted the Commission's unspoken

thought as : (page 85)

"There is going to be a new policy but the

British Government have not yet made up

their minds about it . . . ." I want to say

quite clearly and definitely that there is no

new policy ; [the italics are in the original]

there is no secret to be disclosed and that the

British Government stands today where it did

when it accepted the Mandate and its policy

is the same.

The Commission was not satisfied . It pointed out

that England had a positive obligation to do more

than "constantly to act as an umpire."

The Colonial Office was irritated by the Commission's

findings . The Foreign Secretary replied

for it and subsequently apologized to the League

for his public resentment. England had to go forward

or go backward in the conduct of the Mandate.

Brave men repent their errors . The Colonial

Office determined to justify itself. We do not

know how many times the Hope Simpson report

LEAGUE TAKES HOLD 1 43

was revised . We do know that the Colonial Secretary

on August 22nd told Mr . Felix M. Warburg

that he proposed to pursue a policy, which is

neither that of the Hope Simpson report nor that

of Lord Passfield's White Paper . Lord Passfield

must have seen the Mandates Commission report

before it was public property and before Foreign

Secretary Henderson wrote his response on

August 2nd.

In other words we can almost date the decision

on the part of the Colonial Office to hit

at the Mandates Commission, to strike at the

fundamental structure of the Jewish National

Home and to attack the Jewish Labor Federation

in Palestine, which because of its economic attitude

was presumably enjoying the friendship and

cooperation of the Labor Government . The decision,

not long in the making though in practice

long pursued, was an administrative secret to

about October i oth . Otherwise the Hon. Harry

Snell would not have prepared in London the

address he delivered in Washington before the

American Jewish Congress, on October 19th in

which he declared :

The essential instruction in the Mandate is

to . . . "Place the country under such political

administrative and economic conditions as

144 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

will secure the establishment of the Jewish National

Home." This is indeed, the main purpose

of the Mandate and the apparently contradictory

phrases to this instruction would

appear to be purely subordinate and precautionary.

He held those opinions. He still holds them . But

the Parliamentary Chairman of the Labor Party

would not have traveled to America to enunciate

these opinions on October 19th, if he knew

they were to be hopelessly reversed on October

zoth, in fact that the contradiction had already

been categorically set down by his official associates

of the Labor Party .

IX

THE "CRYSTALLIZATION" PROCESS

WE HAVE avoided discussion of the Hope

Simpson report . Qualified experts are undoubtedly

prepared to disprove and contradict

the findings and conclusions of this particular

expert around whom Lord Passfield has thrown

the aura of governmental omniscience . Sir John

Hope Simpson has spoken neither the first nor

the last word on Palestine. Further, the form of

restriction is of no great moment if the Jews

are in Palestine on sufferance and not of right.

If the primary object of the Mandate for Palestine

is that the Mandatory shall see to it that

every "fellah" shall possess 13o dunams of land,

then a haggling debate as to the available area

of land or as to the cutting off of Beersheba by

Sir John Hope Simpson from the land resources of

Palestine, has neither merit nor purpose . The expert's

information, or his advice on the technique

to be applied in checking both immigration and

land purchases, may here and there illumine a

145

146 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

point, but only the White Paper which proposes

to tell the world what the Mandatory purposes in

Palestine is of vital importance .

Lord Passfield tells us that this "statement of

policy" has been framed after very careful consideration

"of Sir John Hope Simpson's report."

We have very little doubt from the structure of

the sentences of both the constructive and destructive

phases of this statement, that, whoever

the author is, having determined that he would

once and for all time tell the Jews how insignificant

and unimportant they are in the scheme

of things Palestinian, he proceeded to pen it with

meticulous care. There are no ambiguities in this

document. There is nothing in it that is vague,

doubtful or capable of misconstruction. We are

glad of this . Accepting its major premise that

the rights of the non-Jewish population take

precedence and are superior to the establishment

of the Jewish National Home, it goes on

,its way logically, determinedly and definitively .

The statement enters the lists, armed with the

authority of government, to undo and eventually

destroy the Jewish National Home in Palestine .

The first consideration in the White Paper is

the interpretation of the Mandate . With this we

have dealt at length . We differ with Lord Passfield

not only as to his interpretation of the Bal"

CRYSTALLIZATION" 147

four Declaration, but we have quoted the

Permanent Mandates Commission at some length,

(see pages 125-130) because, as we understand

this text, the White Paper by gouging a quotation

out of its context (compare Appendix VII page

2S7) misinterprets the Mandates Commission's

views. If doubt remains as to what the Mandates

Commission meant as to the objective and immediate

purpose of the Mandate then the Jewish

case must inevitably find its way back to the

Commission, and if necessary to court after

court, until the issue is rightfully settled .

The Jewish people have engaged themselves

in Balfour's fine phrase upon a "great adventure"

because they believe with that statesman, "that

the case of the Jews is absolutely exceptional, and

must be treated by exceptional methods ." To

protect themselves, to guard others-Jews fearing

"the great adventure,". Jews opposing it-to

make their position clear to the Arab people, to

deal with them in that spirit of non-alienage

which the Bible so forcibly teaches, and which

the American Zionists so freely incorporated in

the Pittsburgh Program of 1918, the Zionist

leadership suggested, drafted and helped to redraft

the subordinate and protective clauses of

the Balfour Declaration .

148 THE GREAT BETRAYAL

Denying this principle the White Paper proposes

:

i . To set up a legislative council .

2 . To help settle every landless Arab on adequate

land.

3 . To restrict land sales to Jews.

4. To minimize Jewish immigration .

Stated thus baldly the intent is to paralyze, in

practice, the Jewish development the theory of

which it is sought to cancel . The principle which

is denied cannot be confirmed by a ten or twenty

per cent modification of its technical severities .

Of these four policies, only one, the restriction

of Jewish immigration, can be enforced. In the

year 13 2, Hadrian said he would put Jerusalem to

the plow. He did infinite damage : but even

Caesar could not work his will against Judea .

Let us briefly review these four proposals :

i . The Jewish Council of Palestine has already

refused to participate in the Legislative

Council, and the Moslems too are "dissatisfied

with the Legislative Council offer which they

contend does not meet nationalist aspirations ."

The Passfieldian phrase, "steps will be devised

to ensure the appointment of the requisite number

of unofficial members to the Council in the

* New York Times, Nov . 9, 1930, p . 4E.

"CRYSTALLIZATION" 149

event of one or more members failing to be

elected on account of the non-co-operation of any

section of the population, or for any other reason,"

is pointless. The plan thus satisfies neither

Jews nor Arabs . The authority of a Council appointed

by the Mandatory will alter neither the

status of the Mandatory government in Palestine

nor influence the attitude of the inhabitants

towards it . Where democratic or representative

institutions are introduced as laws superimposed,

they suffer invariably the fate of all such legislation.

2 . The Mandates Commission's report shows

that last June there was considerable doubt

even in the minds of the British "accredited representatives"

as to how many Arab "fellahin"

had been dispossessed by the Jewish purchases

of land. It is now claimed that "29 .4 per cent

are landless. It is not known how many of these

families who previously cultivated have since

lost their land ." It is hoped to establish the fact

from the proposed census. Statistics will not deal

with the imponderable drift from the villages

to the cities which is in process in Palestine, as

elsewhere . A census will not ascertain how many

of the "fellahin" are semi-nomadic, moving one

year to Trans-Jordan and another to Syria, a

fact of the social-economic history of the counISO

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

try. Nor will a census prove as a matter of factual

truth which of all the now landless, ever possessed

land. The cadastral survey was begun in 1925

and it is still in process . Its slow operation suggests

the impossibility of putting such policies

into serious practice. The Mandatory, if it attempts

to carry out this policy, is inviting at

least a decade of clamor, just as our American

pension laws have produced new claimants for

several generations . But the attempt to provide

all the landless Arabs with land will achieve one

result, it will put up the price of Palestinian land

and at the same time increase the number of

sellers . This leads to the third point in this

"crystallization" program .

3 . The restriction of land sales can only be

made effective by Jews refusing to buy Palestinian

land. In 1918 the American Zionists urged as a

matter of social justice that the substance of the

Single Tax Theory be applied to Palestinian land

values. In 1920 and I92i, as already pointed out,

the government of Palestine introduced Land

Transfer Ordinances to check land sales . The

ordinances failed because of Arab opposition. In

their judgment the effect * would be to lower

* Report of the Commission on Palestine Disturbances of August,

1929, II4-5, which illustrates the fact that the fellahin quit their lands

even before the transfer of land was registered .

"CRYSTALLIZATION" 151

prices. They wanted to sell and at high prices.

"The cultivator . . . was getting a certain sum

of money, and, away he went, and when the

transaction came to us (the district office) we

found no tenants in the village ." The Jews were

not ousting Arabs in i92i . The Arabs wanted to

go. The Arab answer in 11930 to Lord Passfield

is identical. They "object particularly to the

restriction of land sales-which would be ruinous

to the feudalist interests of the Effendis."

The Arab agitation is conducted by the Effendi

class . But they stand not alone, either as agitators