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

222 DOUGLAS J. FEITH
immediate practical considerations that received greatest attention were,
first of all, cultivating support for Britain among influential pro-Zionist
Jews in Russia and the United States and, second, preempting an anticipated
(but illusory) pro-Zionist declaration by Germany.28
THE BALFOUR DECLARATION
In July 1917, the Zionists proposed to His Majesty's government a draft
declaration proclaiming acceptance of "the principle that Palestine should
be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people. ,,29 The word
"home" in the Zionists' draft echoed the resolution, quoted above, of
Herzl's 1897 Zionist Congress. No one knew how Palestine would develop
under British control. Would Jews immigrate in numbers large enough to
create a Jewish majority? And how long would this take? Until that time,
talk of a Jewish state was deemed premature.
Anti-Zionist Jews, who predominated in the higher reaches of Anglo­
Jewish society, asserted that Zionist aims were "inconsistent with British
citizenship. ,,30 Edwin Montagu, the prominent Jewish Liberal politician
newly appointed secretary of state for India, stated the case to the government
in intensely personal terms: "If you make a statement about Palestine
as the National Home for Jews, every anti-Semitic organisation and
newspaper will ask what right a Jewish Englishman, with the status at
best of a naturalised foreigner, has to take a foremost part in the government
of the British Empire.,,31 Lloyd George told Weizmann: "I know
that with the issue of this Declaration I shall please one group of Jews and
28 Lloyd George's private secretary wrote on May 5, 1917, to a foreign office senior official
that "the raising of a Jewish unit for use in Palestine, if coupled with assurances from
the British Government of their sympathy with the desire of many Jews to settle in
Palestine and build up a community within it, might produce a very beneficial effect in
making the Jews in America and Russia much keener on helping to see the war through."
Gilbert, Exile and Return, 96. See also war cabinet minutes from an October 31, 1917,
meeting, quoted in C. J. Lowe and M. L. Dockrill, eds., The Mirage of Power: British
Foreign Policy, 1902-22,3 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), vol. 3, 550:
"The vast majority of Jews in Russia and America, as, indeed, all over the world, now
appeared to be favourable to Zionism. If we could make a declaration favourable to such
an ideal, we should be able to carryon extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and
America." See also Gilbert, Exile and Return, 105: urging quick action on the pro-Zionist
declaration, Ronald Graham of the foreign office minuted on October 24, 1917, "We
might at any moment be confronted by a German move on the Zionist question."
29 Stein, Balfour Declaration, 664 [appendix). 30 Gilbert, Exile and Return, 99.
31 Montagu to Lloyd George, October 4, 1917, quoted in Stein, Balfour Declaration, 500.