When Britain Renewed the Promise to the Jews ‘His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home.’ By Ruth R. Wisse
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-britain-renewed-the-promise-to-the-jews-1509577957?mod=nwsrl_review_outlook_u_s_&cx_refModule=nwsrl#cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=ctrl&cx_artPos=8
In the living room of our daughter’s home hangs a 4-by-6-foot Jewish flag designed by her paternal great-grandfather, hastily sewn from blue and white material in his Montreal dry-goods store. In November 1917, on receiving news that the British government had just given its support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, Nathan Black strung the flag across his storefront and closed for the day. “Haynt iz a yontev,” he told his workers: “Today is a holiday.”
One hundred years ago on Nov. 2, Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild : “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use 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.”
Known as the Balfour Declaration, it represented a diplomatic high point in the history of the Zionist movement founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. Herzl realized that Zionism would have trouble achieving its political objective of establishing “a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law” without support from one or more of the empires laying claim to the Jewish homeland. His attempt to win that support, cut short by his death in 1904, was taken over by others, such as Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow. The latter’s role in securing the Balfour Declaration was recently brought to light by historian Martin Kramer. Other countries, including France and the U.S., were involved in the discussions over the disposition of Palestine, but the credit for this document was Britain’s. At least on that score credit is deserved.
The Balfour Declaration was a landmark in the political life of Britain no less than in the self-determination of the Jews. Brutally expelled from England in 1290 and formally readmitted in 1656, Jews remained the barometer of toleration in the country’s political and private life.
English literature served up sinister characters like Shylock and Fagin that testify to powerful anti-Jewish prejudice. Then, in 1876, the British novelist George Eliot created the title character Daniel Deronda, an Englishman and Jew who determines to make the Jews a landed nation again, “giving them a national center, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe.” The threat to the Jews in Eliot’s novel comes not from violent aggressors but from Englishmen who cannot understand why Jews should remain a nation. Anticipating Zionism and the Balfour Declaration, Eliot interprets the ability of the English to accept Jewish national rights as the touchstone of their political maturity.
Yet Britain went back on its word. Attempting to appease Arab rulers, it rewarded Arab violence in Palestine in the 1930s by preventing Jews from entering land promised to them by the Bible and the British. While the British betrayal did not directly abet Hitler’s war against the Jews of Europe, it signaled a readiness to abandon the Jews to their fate. It certainly spurred the Arab war against Israel, which began where Germany’s war against the Jews left off. Churchill reminded Parliament in 1939 that the pledge of a Jewish homeland in Palestine had been made not only to the Jews but to the world and that its repudiation was a confession of British weakness.
The Jews would have returned to Zion with or without the consent of Europe. This is the people that, despite the murder of millions of potential Jewish citizens, and within Herzl’s predicted timeline of 50 years, recovered and defended its national sovereignty in the Land of Israel that had been under foreign domination for almost two millennia. But most of the Arab world rejected the very principle of coexistence and consequently spiraled into ever-escalating intramural conflicts. For Arab nations, too, acceptance of an autonomous Jewish presence, if and when it occurs, will be the gauge of their political maturity.
Meantime, in Britain’s Daily Mail, a “proud Jewish woman and patriotic Briton” wrote last month that “many of this country’s 270,000-strong Jewish community no longer feel we have a home here.” The immediate cause of her anguish is the emboldened anti-Semitism of the Labour Party, which traditionally included many Jews. This coalition of grievance endangers the democratic future of the country.
Our family’s flag celebrated a landmark in the restoration of Zion but also another great nation’s readiness to coexist with the Jews on an equal footing. That in itself will not bring peace to the world—but world peace cannot come without it.
Ms. Wisse, a former professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of “Jews and Power” (Schocken, 2007).
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