Churchill, Palestine and Zionism, 1904-1922 - Douglas J. Feith

Palestine and Zionism, 1904-1922 219
replaced Asquith as prime minister. Balfour took Grey's place at the foreign
office. Britain's war strategy and official attitude toward the Near
East changed radically. The new government assigned high priority to
an Eastern strategy, and, in particular, to the liberation of Palestine. The
military, however, generally stuck with Kitchener's view. With little interest
in Palestine and even less in the Jews, it remained reluctant to invest
men and materiel in the Near East, though it hoped to cultivate the Arabs
as potential allies.
The Zionist cause appealed to Lloyd George both as a device and
as an end in itself. He wanted to discard the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement
by which France and Britain had fixed postwar spheres of influence for
themselves in Turkey's Asiatic provinces. is Under Sykes-Picot, most of the
Holy Land was to be internationalized. Britain could more easily assert
exclusive control, however, if it conquered the land for the declared purpose
of restoring it to the Jews. Moreover, that purpose-allowing downtrodden
Jews to realize their millennia I yearning to revive Zion-engaged
Lloyd George's sense of historic justice and gratified his romantic religious
and nationalist sensibilities. Lloyd George had a passion for the Holy
Land and enthusiasm for Zionism. He had received intense instruction in
the Bible as a child and saw parallels between his own beloved people, the
Welsh, and the Jewish people, both with tiny homelands. Lord Curzon once
wrote to Balfour that Lloyd George "clings to Palestine for its sentimental
and traditional value, and talks about Jerusalem with almost the same
enthusiasm as about his native hills. ,,19
Soon after Lloyd George formed his war cabinet, Sir Mark Sykes of
the cabinet secretariat engaged Britain's Zionist leaders in talks to clarify
Zionism's aims and the government's attitude toward them. These
talks had a lively backdrop. In March 1917, Russian revolutionaries, with
Jews prominent in the front ranks, overthrew the tsar. British officials
feared Russia's abandoning the Allied camp. In April, the United States
entered the war, after long delay and with distinctly mixed emotions.
Britain had alienated the sympathies of American Jews by allying with the
antisemitic regime of the tsar. Might not a pro-Zionist declaration help
Britain win favor with influential Jews in Russia and America?
18 Lloyd George described the Anglo-French agreement as "a fatuous arrangement, judged
from any and every point of view." Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol. 4, 1825-6.
19 Gilbert, Exile and Return, 131. When Herzl and Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain
negotiated the abortive plan for a Jewish refuge in British East Africa, Lloyd George, then
a junior member of Parliament, was retained by Herzl's representative as the project's
attorney. Stein, Balfour Declaration, 28.