The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Read Online Free Page B

by marriage: the Rothschilds, Montefiores, Mocattas, Cohens, Goldsmids, Samuels, and Montagus, to name some of the most prominent. Most of them were active in the worlds of finance and philanthropy; a few had risen in politics to enter Parliament, where they sat on both sides of the House. Two literal cousins belonging to the Cousinhood, Herbert Samuel and Edwin Montagu, served in Asquith’s Liberal government.
    Such figures lived like other Englishmen of their class, set apart from them, however, by the religion they practiced and the response it evokedamong certain of their fellow citizens. But British anti-Semitism was relatively mild, and as a result most of the Cousinhood viewed with patriotic affection the country that since 1858 had afforded them and their coreligionists equal civil and political rights. They considered themselves to be Jewish Britons, not British Jews, and they abhorred Zionists, who insisted that Jews constituted a separate people or nation, unassimilable by Britain or by any other country except Palestine.
    This did not mean that they ignored the plight of Jews already settled in Palestine. Some among the Cousinhood were generous in their support. But they did not wish to live there themselves, and they did not believe that establishment of a larger Jewish presence there would contribute much to a solution of the “Jewish problem” in Russia or Romania, or lead to the reduction of anti-Semitism more generally. That a latent sympathy for Zionism underlay this prewar indifference became apparent only a few years later. World War I changed everything, including the attitude of the British government toward both the so-called Zionist dreamers and the Ottoman Empire. Once Zionism entered the realm of practical politics, British Jews flocked to the Zionist banner. Interestingly, however, many among the Cousinhood continued to hold themselves aloof.
    In prewar England three main Zionist associations struggled to gain purchase. The most important, historically speaking, was the English Zionist Federation 6 (EZF). This body, founded in 1899, was the local branch of the World Zionist Organization that the Austrian Theodor Herzl had established two years before. On the eve of World War I about fifty EZF branches dotted the map of Britain in the provincial cities and important towns, in some of the universities, and in London. Its membership rolls contained about four thousand dues-payers. But the prewar EZF did not flourish, lacking impact upon the mass of poor immigrant Jews and upon the British Jewish establishment, including the Cousinhood. It contained a number of able men, including a few with outsize personalities; but its impact upon prewar Britain, Jewish and non-Jewish, was negligible.
    Aside from its seeming utopianism, the EZF failed to prosper before the war because its leadership engaged in unedifying quarrels, sniping, and backstabbing. Plain cussedness and egotism prompted much of it, but a genuine ideological difference existed as well, mirroring a split in the international movement. Some Zionists held, as Herzl had done, that their proper role was political and diplomatic: Zionists must focus on persuading the great powers to support establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Turkish sultan and his government must be the first target of their politicking, since Palestine lay within the Ottoman Empire.
    Britain, which was relatively free of anti-Semitism, was both liberal and imperial, held extensive interests in the Middle East, and still possessed some influence over Turkey, should be the second target. Germany represented a third, and Russia a fourth, but especially for British Zionists, the latter two powers were very much an afterthought. They agreed with Herzl that the great fulcrum upon which Zionists could shift world opinion was in England. During his visits to Britain, Herzl met with Liberal and Conservative politicians and other influential people, testified to a