Sir William George Eden Wiseman

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Sir William George Eden Wiseman

Sir William George Eden Wiseman, 10th Baronet (1 February 1885 – 17 June 1962) was a British intelligence agent and banker. He was a general partner at American investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. from 1929 till 1960.

The grandson of Sir William Wiseman, 8th Baronet, a British naval officer, he received his education at Winchester College and Jesus College, Cambridge. As a businessman before the outbreak of World War I he was Chairman in London of Hendens Trust. From 1914 he served as a Lieutenant Colonel with the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry but, following injury, transferred to military intelligence. He was sent by Secret Intelligence Service director, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, to establish the agency's office in New York, 'Section V'.[1]  As the head of the British intelligence mission in the United States, Wiseman was extensively involved in the counter-intelligence against the Indian sedetionists and was ultimately responsible for leaking to New York Police, bypassing diplomatic channels, the details of a bomb plot that led to the uncovering of the Hindu Conspiracy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%8 ... Conspiracy

He acted as a liaison between Woodrow Wilson and the British government. He and his associate General Julius Klein were closely associated with Special Advisor to Wilson Colonel Edward M. House. Wiseman was also a mentor to spy chief William Stephenson.[2] After the war, was a participant in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. He remained in the U.S. as an employee of Kuhn Loeb, becoming a partner in 1929.


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The Third Pledge

In 1914, the central office of the Zionist Organization and the seat of its directorate, the Zionist Executive, were in Berlin. It already had adherents in most Eastern Jewish communities, including all the countries at war, though its main strength was in Russia and Austria-Hungary.[45] Some important institutions, namely, the Jewish Colonial Trust, the Anglo-Palestine Company and the Jewish National Fund, were incorporated in England. Of the Executive, two members (Otto Warburg [A] and Arthur Hantke) were German citizens, three (Yechiel Tschlenow, Nahum Sokolow and Victor Jacobson) were Russians and one (Shmarya Levin) had recently exchanged his Russian for Austro-Hungarian nationality. The 25 members of the General Council included 12 from Germany and Austria-Hungary, 7 from Russia...Chaim Weizmann and Leopold Kessler) from England, and one each from Belgium, France, Holland and Rumania.[46]

Some prominent German Zionists associated themselves with a newly founded organization known as the Komitee fur den Osten, whose aims were: "To place at the disposal of the German Government the special knowledge of the founders and their relations with the Jews in Eastern Europe and in America, so as to contribute to the overthrow of Czarist Russia and to secure the national autonomy of the Jews." [47]

Influential Zionists outside the Central Powers were disturbed by the activities of the K.f.d.O. and anxious for the Zionist movement not to be compromised. Weizmann's advice was that the central office be moved from Berlin and that the conduct of Zionist affairs during the war should he entrusted to a provisional executive committee for general Zionist affairs in the United States.

At a conference in New York on 30 August 1914, this committee was set up under the chairmanship of Louis D. Brandeis, with the British-born Dr. Richard Gottheil and Jacob de Haas, Rabbi Stephen Wise and Felix Frankfurter, among his principal lieutenants. For Shmarya Levin, the representative of the Zionist Executive in the United States, and Dr. Judah Magnes, to whom the alliance of England and France with Russia seemed "unholy," Russian czarism was the enemy against which their force should be pitted.[48] But on 1 October 1914 Gottheil, first President of the Zionist Organization of America, wrote from the Department of Semitic Languages, Columbia University, to Brandeis in Boston enclosing a memorandum on what the organization planned to seek from the belligerents, with respect to the Russian Jews:

    We have got to be prepared to work under the Government of any one of the Powers ... shall be glad to have any suggestion from you in regard to this memorandum, and shall be glad to know if it meets with your approval. I recognize that I ought not to have put it out without first consulting you; but the exigencies of the situation demanded immediate action. We ought to be fully prepared to take advantage of any occasion that offers itself.[49]

In a speech on 9 November, four days after Britain's declaration of war on Turkey, Prime Minister Asquith said that the traditional eastern policy had been abandoned and the dismemberment of the Turkish Empire had become a war aim. "It is the Ottoman Government," he declared, "and not we who have rung the death knell of Ottoman dominion not only in Europe but in Asia." [50] The statement followed a discussion of the subject at a Cabinet meeting earlier that day, at which we know, from Herbert Samuel's memoirs, that Lloyd George, who had been retained as legal counsel by the Zionists some years before, [51] "referred to the ultimate destiny of Palestine." In a talk with Samuel after the meeting, Lloyd George assured him that "he was very keen to see a Jewish state established in Palestine."

On the same day, Samuel developed the Zionist position more fully in a conversation with the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. He spoke of Zionist aspirations for the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish state, and of the importance of its geographical position to the British Empire. Such a state, he said, ''could not be large enough to defend itself.'' and it would therefore be essential that it should be by constitution, neutral. Grey asked whether Syria as a whole must necessarily go with Palestine, and Samuel replied that this was not only unnecessary but inadvisable, since it would bring in a large and unassimilable Arab population. ''It would,'' he said be a great advantage if the remainder of Syria were annexed by France, as it would be far better for the state to have a European Power as a neighbor than the Turk. " [52]

In January 1915 Samuel produced a Zionist memorandum on Palestine after discussions with Weizmann and Lloyd George. It contained arguments in favor of combining British annexation of Palestine with British support for Zionist aspirations, and ended with objections to any other solultion.[53] Samuel circulated it to his colleagues in the Cabinet. Lloyd George was already a Zionist ''partisan''; Lord Haldane, to whom Weizmann had had access, wrote expressing a friendly interest; [54] though privately expressing Zionist sympathies, the Marquess of Crewe presumably did not express any views in the Cabinet on the memorandum; [55] Zionism had a strong sentimental attraction for Grey[56] but his colleagues, including his cousin Edwin Montagu, did not give him much encouragement. Prime Minister Asquith wrote: "I confess that I am not attracted by the proposed addition to our responsibilities, but it is a curious illustration of Dissy's favorite maxim that race is everything to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of H.S." [57]

After further conversations with Lloyd George and Grey.[58] Samuel circulated a revised text to the Cabinet in the middle of March 1915.

It is not known if the memorandum was formally considered by the Cabinet, but Asquith wrote in his diary on 13 March 1915 of Samuel's "dithyrambic memorandum" of which Lloyd George was ''the only other partisan. '' [59] Certainly, at this time, Zionist claims and aspirations were secondary to British policy towards Russia and the Arabs.

Britain, France and Germany attached considerable importance to the attitudes of Jewry towards them because money and credit were needed for the war. The international banking houses of Lazard Frères, Eugene Mayer, J. & W. Seligman, Speyer Brothers and M.M. Warburg, were all conducting major operations in the United States, as were the Rothschilds through the New York banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Apart from their goodwill. the votes of America's Jewish community of 3,000,000 were important to the issue of that country's intervention or non-intervention in the war, and the provision of military supplies. The great majority represented the one-third of the Jews of Eastern Europe. inculding Russia, who had left their homelands and come to America between 1880 and 1914. Many detested Czarist Russia and wished to see it destroyed. Of these Jews, not more than 12,000 were enrolled members of the Zionist Organization.[60]

The goodwill of Jewry, and especially America's Jews, was assessed by both sides in the war as being very important. The once-poor Eastern European Jews had achieved a dominant position in New York's garment industry. and had become a significant political force. In 1914 they sent a Russian-born socialist to the Congress of the United States. They produced dozens of Yiddish periodicals; they patronized numerous Yiddish theatres and music halls; their sons and daughters were filling the metropolitan colleges and universities.[61]

From the beginning of the war, the German Ambassador in Washington. Count Bernstorff, was provided. by the Komitee fuer den Osten, with an adviser on Jewish Affairs (Isaac Straus); and when the head of the Zionist Agency in Constantinople appealed, in the winter of 1914, to the German Embassy to do what it could to relieve the pressure on the Jews in Palestine, it was reinforced by a similar appeal to Berlin from Bernstorff.[62] In November 1914, therefore, the German Embassy in Constantinople received instructions to recommend that the Turks sanction the re-opening of the Anglo-Palestine Company's Bank -- a key Zionist institution. In December the Embassy made representations which prevented a proiected mass deportation of Jews of Russian nationality.[63] In February 1915 German influence helped to save a number of Jews in Palestine from imprisonment or expulsion, and "a dozen or twenty times" the Germans intervened with the Turks at the request of the Zionist office in Turkey, "thus saving and protecting the Yishuv." [65] The German representations reinforced those of the American Ambassador in Turkey (Henry Morgenthau).[C] [66] Moreover, both the German consulates in Palestine and the head of the German military mission there frequently exerted their influence on behalf of the Jews.[67]

German respect for Jewish goodwill enabled the Constantinople Zionist Agency from December 1914 to use the German diplomatic courier service and telegraphic code for communicating with Berlin and Palestine.[68] On 5 June 1915 Victor Jacobson was received at the German Foreign Office by the Under-Secretary of State (von Zimmerman) and regular contact commenced between the Berlin Zionist Executive (Warburg, Hantke and Jacobson) and the German Foreign Office.[69]

Zionist propagandists in Germany elaborated and publicized the idea that Turkey could become a German satellite and its Empire in Asia made wide open to German enterprise; support for "a revival of Jewish life in Palestine" would form a bastion of German influence in that part of the world.[70] This was followed by solicitation of the German Foreign Office to notify the German consuls in Palestine of the German Government's friendly interest in Zionism. Such a course was favored by von Neurath [D] when asked by Berlin for his views in October, and in November of 1915, the text for such a document was agreed upon and circulated after the approval of the German Chancellor (Bethmann-Hollweg). It was cautiously and vaguely worded so as not to upset Turkish susceptibilities, stating to the Palestine consuls that the German Government looked favorably on "Jewish activities designed to promote the economic and cultural progress of the Jews in Turkey, and also on the immigration and settlement of Jews from other countries." [71]

The Zionists felt that an important advance toward a firm German commitment to their aims had been made, but when the Berlin Zionist Executive pressed for a public assurance of sympathy and support, the Government told them to wait until the end of the war, when a victorious Germany would demonstrate its goodwill.[72]

When Zionist leaders in Germany met Jemal Pasha, by arrangement with the Foreign Office, during his visit to Berlin in the summer of 1917, they were told that the existing Jewish population would be treated fairly but that no further Jewish immigrants would he allowed. Jews could settle anywhere else but not in Palestine. The Turkish Government, Jemal Pasha declared, wanted no new nationality problems, nor was it prepared to antagonize the Palestinian Arabs, "who formed the majority of the population and were to a man opposed to Zionism." [73]

A few weeks after the interview, the Berlin Zionists' pressure was further weakened by the uncovering by Turkish Intelligence of a Zionist spy ring working for General Allenby's Intelligence section under an Aaron Aaronssohn. "It is no wonder that the Germans, tempted as they may have been by its advantages, shrank from committing themselves to a pro-Zionist declaration." [74]

It was fortunate for Zionism that the American Jews as a whole showed no enthusiasm for the Allied cause, wrote Stein, political secretary of the Zionist Organization from 1920 to 1929, "If they had all along been reliable friends, there would have been no need to pay them any special attention." [75]

In 1914 the French Government had sponsored a visit to the United States by Professor Sylvain Levy and the Grand Rabbi of France with the object of influencing Jewish opinion in their favor, but without success. A year later, it tried to reply to disturbing reports from its embassy in Washington about the sympathies of American Jews [76] by sending a Jew of Hungarian origin (Professor Victor Basch) to the United States in November 1915.[77]

Ostensibly he represented the Ministry of Public Instruction, but his real mission was to influence American Jews through contact with their leaders.[78] Though armed with a message to American Jewry from Prime Minister Briand, he encountered an insuperable obstacle -- the Russian alliance. "For Russia there is universal hatred and distrust ... We are reproached with one thing only, the persecution of the Russian Jews, which we tolerate -- a toleration which makes us accomplices ... It is certain that any measures in favor of Jewish emancipation would be equivalent to a great battle lost by Germany." [79] Basch had to report to French President Poincare the failure of his mission.[80]

At the same time that Basch had been dispatched to the United States, the French Government approved the setting up of a "Comité de propagande Francais aupres des Juifs neutres," and Jacques Bigart, the Secretary of the Alliance Israelite, accepted a secretaryship of the Comité. Bigart suggested to Lucien Wolf, of the Jewish Conjoint Foreign Committee in London, that a similar committee be set up there. Wolf consulted the Foreign Office and was invited by Lord Robert Cecil to provide a full statement of his views.[81]

In December 1915 Wolf submitted a memorandum in which he analyzed the characteristics of the Jewish population of the United States and reached the conclusion that "the situation, though unsatisfactory, is far from unpromising." Though disclaiming Zionism, be wrote that "In America, the Zionist organizations have lately captured Jewish opinion." If a statement of sympathy with their aspirations were made, "I am confident they would sweep the whole of American Jewry into enthusiastic allegiance to their cause." [82]

Early in 1916 a further memorandum was submitted to the British Foreign Office as a formal communication from the Jewish Conjoint Foreign Committee. This stated that "the London (Conjoint) and Paris Committees formed to influence Jewish opinion in neutral countries in a sense favorable to the Allies" had agreed to make representations to their respective Governments. First, the Russian Government should be urged to ease the position of their Jews by immediate concessions for national-cultural autonomy secondly, "in view of the great organized strength of the Zionists in the United States," (in fact out of the three million Jews in the U.S. less than 12,000 had enrolled as Zionists in 1913), [83] the Allied Powers should give assurances to the Jews of facilities in Palestine for immigration and colonization, liberal local self-government for Jewish colonists, the establishment of a Jewish university, and for the recognition of Hebrew as one of the vernaculars of the land -- in the event of their victory.[84]

On 9 March 1916 the Zionists were informed by the Foreign Office that "your suggested formula is receiving (Sir Edward Grey's) careful and sympathetic attention, but it is necessary for H.M.G. to consult their Allies on the subject." [85] A confidential memorandum was accordingly addressed to the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs in Petrograd, to ascertain his views, though its paternity, seeing that Asquith was still Prime Minister, "remains to be discovered." [86] No direct reply was received, but in a note addressed to the British and French ambassadors four days later, Sazonov obliquely assented, subject to guarantees for the Orthodox Church and its establishments, to raise no objection to the settlement of Jewish colonists in Palestine.[87]

Nothing came of these proposals. On 4 July the Foreign Office informed the Conjoint Committee that an official announcement of support was inopportune.[88] They must be considered alongside the Sykes-Picot Agreement being negotiated at this time, and the virtual completion of the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence by 10 March 1916, with the hope that an Arab revolt and other measures would bring victory near.

But 1916 was a disastrous year for the Allies. "In the story of the war" wrote Lloyd George,

    the end of 1916 found the fortunes of the Allies at their lowest ebb. In the offensives on the western front we had lost three men for every two of the Germans we had put out of action. Over 300,000 British troops were being immobilized for lack of initiative or equipment or both by the Turks in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and for the same reason nearly 400,000 Allied soldiers were for all purposes interned in the malarial plains around Salonika.[89]

The voluntary system of enlistment was abolished, and a mass conscript army of continental pattern was adopted, something which had never before occurred in British history.[E] [90] German submarine activity in the Atlantic was formidable; nearly 11/2 million tons of merchant shipping had been sunk in 1916 alone. As for paying for the war, the Allies at first had used the huge American debts in Europe to pay for war supplies, but by 1916 the resources of J.P. Morgan and Company, the Allies' financial and purchasing agents in the United States, were said to be nearly exhausted by increased Allied demands for American credit.[91] There was rebellion in Ireland. Lord Robert Cecil stated to the British Cabinet: "France is within measurable distance of exhaustion. The political outlook of Italy is menacing. Her finance is tottering. In Russia, there is great discouragement. She has long been on the verge of revolution. Even her man-power seems coming near its limits. '' [94]

Secretary of State Kitchener was gone -- drowned when the cruiser Hampshire sank on 5 June 1916 off the Orkneys when he was on his way to Archangel and Petrograd to nip the revolution in the bud. He had a better knowledge of the Middle East than anyone else in the Cabinet. The circumstances suggest espionage and treachery. Walter Page, the U.S. Ambassador in London, entered in his diary: "There was a hope and feeling that he (Lord Kitchener) might not come back... as I make out."

There was a stalemate on all fronts. In Britain, France and Germany, hardly a family numbered all its sons among the living. But the British public -- and the French, and the German -- were not allowed to know the numbers of the dead and wounded. By restricting war correspondents, the American people were not allowed to know the truth either.

The figures that are known are a recital of horrors.[E]

In these circumstances, a European tradition of negotiated peace in scores of wars, might have led to peace at the end of 1916 or early 1917.

Into this gloomy winter of 1916 walked a new figure. He was James Malcolm, [F] an Oxford educated Armenian [G] who, at the beginning of 1916, with the sanction of the British and Russian Governments, had been appointed by the Armenian Patriarch a member of the Armenian National Delegation to take charge of Armenian interests during and after the war. In this official capacity, and as adviser to the British Government on Eastern affairs, [95] he had frequent contacts with the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office, the War Office and the French and other Allied embassies in London, and made visits to Paris for consultations with his colleagues and leading French officials. He was passionately devoted to an Allied victory which he hoped would guarantee the national freedom of the Armenians then under Turkish and Russian rule.

Sir Mark Sykes, with whom he was on terms of family friendship, told him that the Cabinet was looking anxiously for United States intervention in the war on the side of the Allies, but when asked what progress was being made in that direction, Sykes shook his head glumly, "Precious little," he replied.

James Malcolm now suggested to Mark Sykes that the reason why previous overtures to American Jewry to support the Allies had received no attention was because the approach had been made to the wrong people. It was to the Zionist Jews that the British and French Governments should address their parleys.

"You are going the wrong way about it," said Mr. Malcolm. "You can win the sympathy of certain politically-minded Jews everywhere, and especially in the United States, in one way only, and that is, by offering to try and secure Palestine for them." [96]

What really weighed most heavily now with Sykes were the terms of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement. He told Malcolm that to offer to secure Palestine for the Jews was impossible. "Malcolm insisted that there was no other way and urged a Cabinet discussion. A day or two later, Sykes told him that the matter had been mentioned to Lord Milner who had asked for further information. Malcolm pointed out the influence of Judge Brandeis of the American Supreme Court, and his strong Zionist sympathies." [97]

In the United States, the President's adviser, Louis D. Brandeis, a leading advocate of Zionism, had been inducted as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on 5 June 1916. That Wilson was vulnerable was evident, in that as early as 1911, he had made known his profound interest in the Zionist idea and in Jewry.[98]

Malcolm described Wilson as being "attached to Brandeis by ties of peculiar hardness," a cryptic reference to the story that Wilson had been blackmailed for $40,000 for some hot love letters he had written to his neighbor's wife when he was President of Princeton. He did not have the money, and the go-between, Samuel Untermeyer, of the law firm of Guggenheim, Untermeyer & Marshall, said he would provide it if Wilson would appoint to the next vacancy on the Supreme Court a nominee selected by Mr. Untermeyer. The money was paid, the letters returned, and Brandeis had been the nominee.

Wilson had written to the Senate, where opposition to the nominee was strong: "I have known him. I have tested him by seeking his advice upon some of the most difficult and perplexing public questions about which it was necessary for me to form a judgment When Brandeis had been approved by the Senate, Wilson wrote to Henry Morgenthau: "I never signed any commission with such satisfaction." "Relief" might have been a more appropriate word.

The fact that endorsement of Wilson's nominee by the Senate Judiciary Committee had only been made "after hearings of unprecedented length" [99] was not important. Brandeis had the President's ear; he was "formally concerned with the Department of State." [100] This was the significant development, said Malcolm, which compelled a new approach to the Zionists by offering them the key to Palestine.

The British Ambassador to the United States (Sir Cecil Spring-Rice) had written from Washington in January 1914 that "a deputation came down from New York and in two days 'fixed' the two Houses so that the President had to renounce the idea of making a new treaty with Russia." [101] In November 1914 he had written to the British Foreign Secretary of the German Jewish bankers who were extending credits to the German Government and were getting hold of the principal New York papers" thereby "bringing them over as much as they dare to the German side and "toiling in a solid phalanx to compass our destruction." [102]

This anti-Russian sentiment was part of a deep concern for the well-being of Russian and Polish Jews. Brandeis wrote to his brother from Washington on 8 December 1914: "... You cannot possibly conceive the horrible sufferings of the Jews in Poland and adjacent countries. These changes of control from German to Russian and Polish anti-semitism are bringing miseries as great as the Jews ever suffered in all their exiles." [H] [103]

In a speech to the Russian Duma on 9 February (27 January Gregorian) 1915, Foreign Minister Sazonov denied the calumnious stories which, he said, were circulated by Germany, of accounts of alleged pogroms against the Jews and of wholesale murders of Jews by the Russian armies. "If the Jewish Population suffered in the war zone, that circumstance unfortunately was inevitably associated with war, and the same conditions applied in equal measure to all people living within the region of military activity." He added to the rebuttal with accounts of hardship in areas of German military action in Poland, Belgium and Serbia.[104]

It is noteworthy that the chairman of the non-Zionist American Jewish Committee responded to an appeal by the Brandeis group that all American Jews should organize to emphasize Zionist aims in Palestine before the Great Powers in any negotiations during or at the end of the war, by dissociating his community from the suggestion that Jews of other nationalities were to be accorded special status. He said that "the very thought of the mass of the Jews of America having a voice in the matter of deciding the welfare of the Jews in the world made him shrink in horror."[107]

The new approach to the Zionist movement by Mark Sykes with James Malcolm as preliminary interlocutor took the form of a series of meetings at Chaim Weizmann's London house, with the knowledge and approval of the Secretary of the War Cabinet, Sir Maurice Hankey.

A Programme for a New Administration of Palestine in Accordance with the Aspirations of the Zionist Movement was issued by the English Political Committee of the Zionist Organization in October 1916, and submitted to the British Foreign Office as a basis for discussion in order to give an official character to the informal house-talks. It included the following:

    (1) The Jewish Chartered Company is to have power to exercise the right of pre-emption over Crown and other lands and to acquire for its own use all or any concessions which may at any time be granted by the suzerain government or governments.

    (2) The present population, being too small, too poor and too little trained to make rapid progress, requires the introduction of a new and progressive element in the population. (But the rights of minority nationalities were to be protected).

Other Points were, (3) recognition of separate Jewish nationality in Palestine; participation of the Palestine Jewish population in local self-government; (5) Jewish autonomy in purely Jewish affairs; (6) official recognition and legalization of existing Jewish institutions for colonization in Palestine.[108]

This Programme does not appear to have reached Cabinet level at the time it was issued, probably because of Asquith's known lack of sympathy, but as recorded by Samuel Landman, the Zionist Organization was given official British facilities for its international correspondence.[109]

Lloyd George, an earnest and powerful demagogue, was now prepared to oust Asquith, his chief, by a coup de main. With the death of Kitchener in the summer of 1916, he had passed from Munitions to the War Office and he saw the top of the parliamentary tree within his grasp. In this manuever he was powerfully aided by the newspaper proprietor Northcliffe, who turned all his publications from The Times downwards to depreciate Asquith, and by the newspaper-owing M.P., Max Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook).

With public sympathy well prepared, Lloyd George demanded virtual control of war policy. It was intended that Asquith should refuse. He did. Lloyd George resigned. Asquith also resigned to facilitate the reconstruction of the Government. The King then sent for the Conservative leader, Bonar Law, who, as prearranged, advised him to offer the premiership to Lloyd George.[110]

Asquith and Grey were out; Lloyd George and Balfour were in. With Lloyd George as Prime Minister from December 1916, Zionist relations with the British Government developed fast. Lloyd George had been legal counsel for the Zionists, and while Minister of Munitions, had had assistance from the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann; the new Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour, was already known for his Zionist sympathies.

The Zionists were undermining the wall between them and their Palestine objective which they had found impossible "to surmount by ordinary political means" prior to the war.[111] Herzl's suggestion that they would get Palestine "not from the goodwill but from the jealousy of the Powers," [112] was being made to come true.

The Zionists moved resolutely to exploit the new situation now that the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary were their firm supporters.

Landman, in his Secret History of the Balfour Declaration, wrote:

    Through General McDonogh, Director of Military Operations, who was won over by Fitzmaurice (formerly Dragoman of the British Embassy in Constantinople and a friend of James Malcolm), Dr. Weizmann was able, about this time, to secure from the Government the services of half a dozen younger Zionists for active work on behalf of Zionism. At the time, conscription was in force, and only those who were engaged on work of national importance could be released from active service at the Front. I remember Dr. Weizmann writing a letter to General McDonogh and invoking his assistance in obtaining the exemption from active service of Leon Simon, (who later rose to high rank in the Civil Service as Sir Leon Simon, C.B.), Harry Sacher, (on the editorial staff of the Manchester Guardian), Simon Marks, [J] Yamson Tolkowsky and myself. At Dr. Weizmann's request I was transferred from the War Office (M.I.9), where I was then working, to the Ministry of Propaganda, which was under Lord Northcliffe, and later to the Zionist office, where I commenced work about December 1916. Simon Marks actually arrived at the Office in khaki, and immediately set about the task of organizing the office which, as will be easily understood, had to maintain constant communications with Zionists in most countries.

    From that time onwards for several years, Zionism was considered an ally of the British Government, and every help and assistance was forthcoming from each government department. Passport or travel difficulties did not exist when a man was recommended by our office. For instance. a certificate signed by me was accepted by the Home Office at that time as evidence that an Ottoman Jew was to be treated as a friendly alien and not as an enemy, which was the case with the Turkish subjects.

   1. Jacob Schiff, German-born senior partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. and "the most influential figure of his day in American Jewish life," wrote in The Menorah Journal of April 1915: "It is well known that I am a German sympathizer ... England has been contaminated by her alliance with Russia ... am quite convinced that in Germany anti~semitism is a thing of the past.[64] The Jewish Encyclopedia for 1906 states that "Schiff's firm subscribed for and floated the large Japanese war loan in 1904-05" (for the Russo-Japanese war). "in recognition of which the Mikado conferred on Schiff the second order of the Sacred Treasure of Japan."
      Partners with Schiff were Felix M. Warburg and his brother Paul who had come to New York in 1902 from Hamburg, and organized the Federal Reserve System.
   2. An award for Morgenthau's heavy financial support for Wilson's presidential campaign.
   3. Later, Foreign Minister (1932-38) and Protector of Bohemia (1939-43).
   4. Russian nationals resident in the United Kingdom (nearly all of them Jews), not having become British subjects, some 25,000 of military age, still escaped military service.[92] This prompted Jabotinsky and Weizmann to urge the formation of a special brigade for Russian Jews, but the idea not favorably received by the Government, and the Zionists joined non-Zionists in an effort to persuade Russian Jews of military age to volunteer as individuals for service in the British army. The response was negligible, and in July 1917 the Military Service (Conventions with Allies) Act was given Royal assent. Men of military age were invited to serve in the British army or risk deportation to Russia. However, the Russian revolution prevented its unhindered application.[93]
   5. Half a million Frenchmen were lost in the first four months of war, 1 million lost by the end of 1915, and 5 million by 1918. Who can imagine that the Allies lost 600,000 men in one battle, the Somme, and the British more officers in the first few months than all wars of the previous hundred years put together?
      At Stalingrad, in the Second World War, the Wehrmacht had 230,000 men in the field. The German losses at Verdun alone were 325,000 killed or wounded.
      By this time a soldier in one of the better divisions could count on a maximum of three months' service without being killed or wounded, and the life expectancy for an officer at the front was down to five months in an ordinary regiment and six weeks in a crack one.
   6. See his Origins of the Balfour Declaration: Dr. Weizmann's Contribution reprinted by the IHR, $2.00 postpaid.
   7. Born in Persia, where his family had settled before Elizabethan days. He was sent to school in England in 1881, being placed in the care of a friend and agent of his family, Sir Albert (Abdullah) Sassoon. Early in 1915, he founded the Russia Society in London among the British public as a means of improving relations between the two countries. Unlike the Zionists, he had no animus towards Czarist Russia.
   8. A reference to the 1914 invasion of Austria and East Prussia by the Russians with such vigor that many people believed that the "Russian steamroller" would soon reach Berlin and end the war. Only the diversion of whole army divisions from the Western to the Eastern Front under the command of General von Hindenburg saved Berlin, and in turn saved Paris.
      There was a direct effort by certain groups to support anti-Imperial activities in Russia from the United States, [105][106] but Brandeis was apparently not implicated.
   9. Northcliffe was small-minded enough to have Lloyd George called to the telephone, in front of friends, to demonstrate the politician's need of the Press.
  10. Associated with Israel M. Sieff, another of Weizmann's inner circle, in the business which later became Marks & Spencer, Ltd. Sieff was appointed an economic consultant to the U.S. Administration (OPA) in March 1924. As subsequent supporters, with Lord Melchett, of "Political and Economic Planning" (PEP), they exercised considerable influence on British inter-war policy.


The Declaration, 1917

The informal committee of Zionists and Mark Sykes as representative of the British Government, met on 7 February 1917 at the house of Moses Gaster, [A] the Chief Rabbi of the Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese) congregations in England. Gaster opened the meeting with a statement that stressed Zionist support for British strategic interests in Palestine which were to be an integral part of any agreement between them. As these interests might be considered paramount to British statesmen, support for Zionist aims there, Caster said, was fully justified. Zionism was irrevocably opposed to any internationalization proposals, even an Anglo-French condominium.[113]

Herbert Samuel followed with an expression of the hope that Jews in Palestine would receive full national status, which would be shared by Jews in the Diaspora. The question of conflict of nationality was not mentioned and a succeeding speaker, Harry Sacher, suggested that the sharing should not involve the political implications of citizenship.[114] Weizmann spoke of the necessity for unrestricted immigration. It is clear that the content of each speech was thoroughly prepared before the meeting.

Sykes outlined the obstacles: the inevitable Russian objections, the opposition of the Arabs, and strongly pressed French claims to all Syria, including Palestine.[115] James de Rothschild and Nahum Sokolow, the international Zionist leader, also spoke.

   1. The meeting ended with a summary of Zionist objectives:
   2. International recognition of Jewish right to Palestine;
   3. Juridical nationhood for the Jewish community in Palestine:
   4. The creation of a Jewish chartered company in Palestine with rights to acquire land:
   5. Union and one administration for Palestine; and
   6. Extra-territorial status for the holy places.[117]

The first three points are Zionist, the last two were designed to placate England and Russia, respectively [118] and probably Italy and the Vatican. Sokolow was chosen to act as Zionist representative, to negotiate with Sir Mark Sykes.

The Zionists were, of course, coordinating their activities internationally. On the same day as the meeting in London, Rabbi Stephen Wise in the United States wrote to Brandeis: "I sent the memorandum to Colonel House covering our question, and he writes: 'I hope the dream you have may soon become a reality." [118a]

The reports reaching England of impending dissolution of the Russian state practically removed the need for Russian endorsement of Zionist aims, but made French and Italian acceptance even more urgent. This at any rate was the belief of Sykes, Balfour, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, who, as claimed in their subsequent statements, were convinced that proclaimed Allied support for Zionist aims would especially influence the United States. Events in Russia made the cooperation of Jewish groups with the Allies much easier. At a mass meeting in March 1917 to celebrate the revolution which had then taken place, Rabbi Stephen Wise, who had succeeded Brandeis as chairman of the American Provisional Zionist Committee after Brandeis's appointment to the Supreme Court, said: "I believe that of all the achievements of my people, none has been nobler than the part the sons and daughters of Israel have taken in the great movement which has culminated in free Russia." [119]

Negotiations for a series of loans totalling $190,000,000 by the United States to the Provisional Government in Russia of Alexander Kerensky were begun on the advice of the U.S. ambassador to Russia, David R. Francis, who noted in his telegram to Secretary of State Lansing, "financial aid now from America would be a master-stroke. Confidential. Immeasurably important to the Jews that revolution succeed... " [120]

On 22 March1917 Jacob H. Schiff of Kuhn, Loch & Co., wrote to Mortimer Schiff, "We should be somewhat careful not to appear as overzealous but you might cable Cassel because of recent action of Germany (the declaration of unlimited U-boat warfare) and developments in Russia we shall no longer abstain from Allied Governments financing when opportunity offers."

He also sent a congratulatory cable to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the first Provisional Government, referring to the previous government as "the merciless persecutors of my co-religionists."

In the same month, Leiber Davidovich Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky, a Russian-born U.S. immigrant, had left the Bronx, New York, for Russia, with a contingent of followers, while V.I. Ulyanov (Lenin) and a party of about thirty were moving across Germany from Switzerland, through Scandinavia to Russia. Some evidence exists that Schiff and other sponsors like Helphand financed these revolutionaries.

In March 1917, President Wilson denounced as "a little group of willful men," the non-interventionists who filibustered an Administration-sponsored bill that would have empowered Wilson to wage an undeclared naval war against Germany. The opposition to Wilson was led by Senators La Follette and Norris.

On 5 April, the day before the United States Congress adopted a resolution of war, Schiff had been informed by Baron Gunzburg of the actual signing of the decrees removing all restrictions on the Jews in Russia.

At a special session of Gongress on 2 April 1917, President Wilson referred to American merchant ships taking supplies to the Allies which had been sunk during the previous month by German submarines (operating a counter-blockade; the British and French fleets having blockaded the Central Powers from the beginning of the war); and then told Congress that "wonderful and heartening things have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia."

He asked for a declaration of war with a mission:

    for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.

    To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace that she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other. (emphasis supplied)

That night crowds filled the streets, marching, shouting, singing Dixie" or "The Star Spangled Banner." Wilson turned to his secretary, Tumulty: "Think what that means, the applause. My message tonight was a message of death, How strange to applaud that!"

So, within six months of Malcolm's specific suggestion to Sykes, the United States of America, guided by Woodrow Wilson, was on the side of the Allies in the Great War.

Was Wilson guided by Brandeis away from neutrality -- to war?

In London, the War Cabinet led by Lloyd George lost no time committing British forces first to the capture of Jerusalem, and then to the total expulsion of the Turks from Palestine. The attack on Egypt, launched on 26 March 1917, attempting to take Gaza, ended in failure. By the end of April a second attack on Gaza had been driven back and it had become clear that there was no prospect of a quick success on this Front.

From Cairo, where he had gone hoping to follow the Army into Jerusalem with Weizmann, Sykes telegraphed to the Foreign Office that, if the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was not reinforced then it would be necessary "to drop all Zionist projects ... Zionists in London and U.S.A. should be warned of this through M. Sokolow... " [120a]

Three weeks later, Sykes was told that reinforcements were coming from Salonika. The War Cabinet also decided to replace the Force's commander with General Allenby.

Sykes was the official negotiator for the whole project of assisting the Zionists. He acted immediately after the meeting at Gaster's house by asking his friend M. Picot to meet Nahum Sokolow at the French Embassy in London in an attempt to induce the French to give way on the question of British suzerainty in Palestine.[121] James Malcolm was then asked to go alone to Paris to arrange an interview for Sokolow directly with the French Foreign Minister. Sokolow had been previously unsuccessful in obtaining the support of French Jewry for a meeting with the Minister; since the richest and most influential Jews in the United States and England, with the notable exception of the Rothschilds, who could have arranged such a meeting, were opposed to the political implications of Zionism. In Paris, the powerful Alliance Israélite Universelle had made every effort to dissuade him from his mission.[122] Not that the Zionists had no supporters in France other than Edmond de Rothschild, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had no reason to entangle itself with them.[123] Now James Malcolm opened the door directly to them as he had done in London.

Sykes joined Malcolm and Sokolow in Paris. Sykes and Malcolm, apart from the consideration of Zionism and future American support for the war, were concerned with the possibility of an Arab-Jewish-Armenian entente which, through amity between Islamic, Jewish and Christian peoples, would bring peace, stability and a bright new future for the inhabitants of this area where Europe, Asia Minor and Africa meet. Sokolow went along for the diplomatic ride, but in a letter to Weizmann (20 April 1917) he wrote: "I regard the idea as quite fantastic. It is difficult to reach an understanding with the Arabs, but we will have to try. There are no conflicts between Jews and Armenians because there are no common interests whatever." [C] [124]

Several conversations were held with Picot, including one on 9 April when other officiaJs included Jules Cambon, the Secretary-General of the Foreign Ministry, and the Minister's Chef de Cabinet, Exactly what assurances were given to Sokolow is uncertain, but he wrote to Weizmann "that they accept in principle the recognition of Jewish nationality in terms of a national home, local autonomy, etc." [125] And to Brandeis and Tschlenow, he telegraphed through French official channels: "... Have full confidence Allied victory will realise our Palestine Zionist aspirations." [126]

Sokolow set off for Rome and the Vatican. "There, thanks to the introductions of Fitzmaurice on the one hand and the help of Baron Sidney Sonnino [D] on the other," a Papal audience and interviews with the leading Foreign Office officials were quickly arranged.[127]

When Sokolow returned to Paris, he requested and received a letter from the Foreign Minister dated 4 June 1917, supporting the Zionist cause in general terms. He hastily wrote two telegrams which he gave to M. Picot for dispatch by official diplomatic channels. One was addressed to Louis D. Brandeis in the United States. It read: "Now you can move. We have the formal assurance of the French Government." [E] [128]

"After many years, ' wrote M. Picot, "I am still moved by the thanks he poured out to me as he gave me the two telegrams ... do not say that it was the cause of the great upsurge of enthusiasm which occurred in the United States, but I say that Judge Brandeis, to whom this telegram was addressed, was certainly one of the elements determining the decision of President Wilson." [129]

But Wilson had declared war one month before!

It is natural that M. Picot should want to believe that he had played a significant part in bringing America into the war and therefore helping his country's victory. The evidence certainly supports his having a part in helping a Zionist victory.

Their objective was in sight, but had still to be taken and held.

Although the United States was now a belligerent, no declaration of support had been made for the Zionist program for Palestine, either by Britain or the United States, and some of the richest and most powerful Jews in both countries were opposed to it.

The exception among these Jewish merchant princes was, of course, the House of Rothschild. From London on 25 April 1917, James de Rothschild cabled to Brandeis that Balfour was coming to the United States, and urged American Jewry to support "a Jewish Palestine under British Protection,,, as well as to press their government to do so. He advised Brandeis to meet Balfour.[134] The meeting took place at a White House luncheon, "You are one of the Americans I wanted to meet," said the British Foreign Secretary.[135] Brandeis cabled Louis de Rothschild: "Have had a satisfactory talk with Mr. Balfour, also with Our President. This is not for Publication. " [136]

On the other hand, a letter dated 17 May 1917 appeared in The Times (London) signed by the President of the Jewish Board of Deputies and the President of the Anglo-Jewish Association (Alexander and Montefiore, both men of wealth and eminence) stating their approval of Jewish settlement in Palestine as a source of inspiration for all Jews, but adding that they could not favor the Zionist's political scheme. Jews, they believed, were a religious community and they opposed the creation of "a secular Jewish nationality recruited on some loose and obscure principle of race and ethnological peculiarity." They particularly took exception to Zionist Pressure for a Jewish chartered company invested with political and economic privileges in which Jews alone would participate, Since this was incompatible with the desires of world Jewry for equal rights wherever they lived.[137]

A controversy then ensued in the British press, in Jewish associations and in the corridors of government, between the Zionist and non-Zionist Jews. In this, Weizmann really had less weight, but he mobilized the more forceful team. The Chief Rabbi dissociated himself from the non-Zionist statement and charged that the Alexander-Montefiore letter did not represent the views of their organizations.[138] Lord Rothschild wrote: "We Zionists cannot see how the establishment of an autonomous Jewish State under the aegis of one of the Allied Powers could be subversive to the loyalty of Jews to countries of which they were citizens. In the letter you have published, the question is also raised of a chartered company." He continued: "We Zionists have always felt that if Palestine is to be colonized by the Jews, some machinery must be set up to receive the iimmigrants, settle them on the land and develop the land, and to be generally a directing agency. I can only again emphasize that we Zionists have no wish for privileges at the expense of other nationalities, but only desire to be allowed to work out our destinies side by side with other nationalities in an autonomous state under the suzerainty of one of the Allied Powers." [139] This letter stressed the colonialist aspect of Zionism, but detracted fmm the strong statist declaration of Weizmann. The Zionist body in Palestine was to be of a more organizational character for the Jewish community.

Perhaps feeling that his statement bad been a little too strong for liberal acceptance, Weizmann also joined this correspondence in the Times. Writing as President of the English Zionist Federation, he first claimed that,

    it is strictly a question of fact that the Jews are a nationality. An overwhelming majority of them had always had the conviction that they were a nationality, which has been shared by non-Jews in all countries."

The letter continued:

    The Zionists are not demanding in Palestine monopolies or exclusive privileges, nor are they asking that any part of Palestine should he administered by a chartered company to the detriment of others. It always was and remains a cardinal principle of Zionism as a democratic movement that all races and sects in Palestine should enjoy full justice and liberty, and Zionists are confident that the new suzerain whom they hope Palestine will acquire as a result of the war will, in its administration of the country, be guided by the same principle.[140] (emphasis supplied)

The competition for the attention of the British public and British Jewry by the Zionists and their Jewish opponents continued in the press and in their various special meetings. A manifesto of solidarity with the opinions of Alexander and Montefiore was sent to The Times on 1 June 1917; and in the same month at Buffalo, N.Y., the President of the Annual Convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis added his weight against Jewish nationalism: "I am not here to quarrel with Zionism. Mine is only the intention to declare that we, as rabbis, who are consecrated to the service of the Lord ... have no place in a movement in which Jews band together on racial or national grounds, and for a political State or even for a legally-assured Home." [141]

But while the controversy continued, the Zionists worked hard to produce a draft document which could form a declaration acceptable to the Allies, particularly Britain and the United States, and which would be in the nature of a charter of international status for their aims in Palestine. This was treated as a matter of urgency, as Weizmann believed it would remove the support from non-Zionist Jews [142] and ensure against the uncertainties inseparable from the war.

On 13 June 1917 Weizmann wrote Sir Ronald Graham at the Foreign Office that "it appears desirable from every point of view that the British Government should give expression to its sympathy and support of the Zionist claims on Pales tine. In fact, it need only confirm the view which eminent and representative members of the Government have many times expressed to us ... " [143] This was timed to coincide with a minute of the same date of one of Balfour's advisers in which it was suggested that the time had arrived "when we might meet the wishes of the Zionists and give them an assurance that H.M.G. are in general sympathy with their aspirations. " [144] To which Balfour remarked, "Personally, I should still prefer to associate the U.S.A. in the Protectorate, should we succeed in securing it." [145]

The Zionists also had to counter tentative British and American plans to seek a separate peace with Turkey. When Weizmann, for the Zionists, together with Malcolm, for the Armenians, went on 10 June to the Foreign Office to protest such a plan, Weizmann broadly suggested that the Zionist leaders in Germany were being courted by the German Government, and he mentioned, to improve credibility, that approaches were made to them through the medium of a Dr. Lepsius.

The truth, probably, is that the Berlin Zionist Executive was initiating renewed contact with the German Government so as to give weight to the pleading of their counterparts in London that the risk of German competition could not be left out of account. Lepsius was actually a leading Evangelical divine, well known for his championship of the Armenians, who were then being massacred in Turkey. When Leonard Stein examined the papers of the Berlin Executive after the war, his name was not to be found, and Mr. Lichtheim of the Executive had no recollection of any overtures by Lepsius.[146]

In the U.S., in July 1917, a special mission consisting of Henry Morgenthau, Sr., and Justice Brandeis's nephew, Felix Frankfurter, was charged by President Wilson to proceed to Turkey, against which the United States did not declare war, to sound out the possibility of peace negotiations between Turkey and the Allies. In this, Wilson may have been particularly motivated by his passion to stop the massacres of Armenian and Greek Christians which were then taking place in Turkey and for whom he expressed immense solicitude On many occasions. Weizmann, however, accompanied by the French Zionist M. Weyl, forewarned, proceeded to intercept them at Gibraltar and persuaded them to return home.[147] During 1917 and 1918 more Christians were massacred in Turkey. Had Morgenthau and Frankfurter carried out their mission successfully, maybe this would have been avoided.

This account appears in William Yale's book The Near East: A Modern History. He was a Special Agent of the State Department in the Near East during the First World War. When I had dinner with him on 12 May 1970 at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, I asked him if Weizmann had told him how the special mission had been aborted. He replied that Weizmann said that the Governor of Gibraltar had held a special banquet in their honor, but at the end all the British officials withdrew discretely, leaving the four Jews alone. "Then," said Weizmann, "we fixed it."

The same evening, he told me something which he said he had never told anyone else, and which was in his secret papers which were only to be opened after his death. He later wrote to me, after he had read The Palestine Diary, saying that he would like me to deal with those papers.

One of Yale's assignments was to follow Wilson's preference for having private talks with key personalities capable of influencing the course of events. He did this with Lloyd George, General Allenby and Col. T.E. Lawrence, for example. Yale said he had a talk with Weizmann "somewhere in the Mediterranean in 1919," and asked him what might happen if the British did not support a national home for the Jews in Palestine. Weizmann thumped his fist on the table and the teacups jumped, "If they don't," he said, "we'll smash the British Empire as we smashed the Russian Empire."

Brandeis was in Washington during the summer of 1917 and conferred with Secretary of State Robert S. Lansing from time to time on Turkish-American relations and the treatment of Jews in Palestine.[148] He busied himself in particular with drafts of what later became the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate for Palestine, and in obtaining American approval for them.[149] A considerable number of drafts were made in London and transmitted to the United States, through War Office channels, for the use of the American Zionist Political Committee. Some were detailed, but the British Government did not want to commit itself to more than a general statement of principles.

On 18 July, such a statement, approved in the United States, was forwarded by Lord Rothschild to Lord Balfour. It read as follows:

    His Majesty's Government, after considering the aims of the Zionist Organization, accepts the principle of recognizing Palestine as the National Home [E] of the Jewish people and the right of the Jewish people to build up its national life in Palestine under a protectorate to be established at the conclusion of peace following the successful issue of war.

    His Majesty's Government regards as essential for the realization of this priniciple the grant of internal autonomy to the Jewish nationality in Palestine, freedom of immigration for Jews, and the establishment of a Jewish national colonization corporation for the resettlement and economic development of the country.

    The conditions and forms of the internal autonomy and a charter for the Jewish naitional colonizing corporation should, in the view of His Majesty's Government, be elaborated in detail, and determined with the repersentatives of the Zionist Organization.[150]

It seems possible that Balfour would have issued this declaration but strong representatives against it were made directly to the Cabinet by Lucien Wolf, Claude Montefiore Sir Mathew Nathan, Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu, [F] and other non-Zionist Jews. It was significant they believed that "anti-semites are always very sympathetic to Zionism," and though they would welcome the establishment in Palestine of a center of Jewish culture, some -- like Philip Magnes -- feared that a political declaration would antagonize other sections of the population in Palestine, and might result in the Turks dealing with the Jews as they had dealt with the Armenians.[154] The Jewish opposition was too important to ignore, and the preparation of a new draft was commenced. At about this time, Northcliffe and Reading [G] visited Washington and had a discussion with Brandeis at which they undoubtedly discussed Zionism.[155]

Multiple pressures at key points led Lord Robert Cecil to telegraph to Col. E.M. House on 3 September 1917: "We are being pressed here for a declaration of sympathy with the Zionist movement and I should be very grateful if you felt able to ascertain unofficially if the President favours such a declaration. " [156] House, who had performed services relating to Federal Reserve and currency legislation for Jacob W. Schiff and Paul Warburg, [157] and was Wilson's closet adviser, relayed the message, but a week later Cecil was still without a reply.

On 11 September the Foreign Office had ready for dispatch the following message for Sir William Wiseman, [H] head of the British Military Intelligence Service in the United States: "Has Colonel House been able to ascertain whether the President favours sympathy with Zionist aspirations as asked in my telegram of September 3rd? We should be most grateful for an early reply as September 17th is the Jewish New Year and announcement of sympathy by or on that date would have excellent effect." But before it was sent, a telegram from Colonel House dated 11 September reached the Foreign Office.

Wilson had been approached as requested and had expressed the opinion that "the time was not opportune for any definite statement further, perhaps, than one of sympathy, provided it can be made without conveying any real commitment." Presumably, a formal declaration would presuppose the expulsion of the Turks from Palestine, but the United States was not at war with Turkey, and a declaration implying annexation would exclude an early and separate peace with that country.[158]

In a widely publicized speech in Cincinnati on 21 May 1916, after temporarily relinquishing his appointment as Ambassador to Turkey in favor of a Jewish colleague, Henry Morgenthau had announced that he had recently suggested to the Turkish Government that Turkey should sell Palestine to the Zionists after the war. The proposal, he said, had been well received, but its publication caused anger in Turkey.[159]

Weizmann was "greatly astonished" at this news, especially as he had "wired to Brandeis requesting him to use his influence in our favour ... But up to now I have heard nothing from Brandeis." [161]

On 19 September Weizmann cabled to Brandeis:

    Following text declaration has been approved by Foreign Office and Prime Minister and submitted to War Cabinet:

   1.

   2. H.M. Government accepts the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people.
   3. H.M. Government will use its best endeavours to secure the achievement of the oblect and will discuss the necessary methods and means with the Zionist Organization.[162]

Weizmann suggested that non-Zionist opposition should be forestalled, and in this it would "greatly help if President Wilson and yourself support the text. Matter most urgent.'' [163] He followed this up with a telegram to two leading New York Zionists, asking them to "see Brandeis and Frankfurter to immediately discuss my last two telegrams with them," adding that it might be necessary for him to come to the United States himself.[164]

Brandeis saw House on 23 September and drafted a message, sent the following day through the British War Office. It advised that presidential support would be facilitated if the French and Italians made inquiry about the White House attitude, but he followed this the same day with another cable stating that from previous talks with the President and in the opinion of his close advisers. he could safely say that Wilson would be in complete sympathy.[165]

Thus Brandeis had either persuaded Wilson that there was nothing in the draft (Rothschild) declaration of 19 September which could be interpreted as "conveying any real commitlment," which is difficult to believe, or he had induced the President to change his mind about the kind of declaration, he could approve or was sure he and House could do so.[166]

O

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

On 30 June 1922, the following resolution was adopted by the United States Congress:

    Favouring the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people;

    Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. That the United States of America favours the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which should prejudice the civil and religious rights of Christians and all other non-Jewish communities in Palestine, and that the holy places and religious buildings and sites in Palestine shall be adequately protected.[J]

All people tend to see the world and its events in terms of their own experience, ideas and prejudices. This is natural. It is a fact used by master politicians and manipulators of opinion who form their appeals accordingly. The case of the Balfour Declaration is a fascinating example of a scheme presenting a multiplicity of images according to the facet of mind on which it reflected.

There were critics of the Balfour Declaration, although among the cacophony of many events competing for attention, few but its beneficiaries concentrated on the significance of what was being offered. One was the Jewish leader and statesman Mr. Edwin Montagu, who had no desire that Jews should be regarded as a separate race and a distinct nationality.[181] The other was Lord Curzon, who became Foreign Secretary at the end of October 1918. He prepared a memorandum dated 26 October 1917, on the penultimate and final drafts of the Balfour Declaration and related documents, and circulated it in the Cabinet. It was titled "The Future of Palestine." Here are some extracts:

    I am not concerned to discuss the question in dispute between the Zionist and anti-Zionist jews . I am only concerned in the more immediately practical questions:

    (a) What is the meaning of the phrase "a national home for the Jewish race in Palestine," and what is the nature of the obligation that we shall assume if we accept this as a principle of British policy?

    (b) If such a policy be pursued what are the chances of its successful realisation?

    If I seek guidance from the latest collection of circulated papers (The Zionist Movement, G.-164) I find a fundamental disagreement among the authorities quoted there as to the scope and nature of their aim.

    A "national home for the Jewish race or people" would seem, if the words are to bear their ordinary meaning, to imply a place where the Jews can be reassembled as a nation, and where they will enjoy the privileges of an independent national existence. Such is clearly the conception of those who, like Sir Alfred Mond, speak of the creation in Palestine of "an autonomous Jewish State," words which appear to contemplate a State, i.e., a political entity, composed of Jews, governed by Jews, and administered mainly in the interests of Jews...

    The same conception appears to underlie several other of the phrases employed in these papers, e.g., when we are told that Palestine is to become "a home for the Jewish nation," "a national home for the Jewish race," "a Jewish Palestine," and when we read of "the resettlement of Palestine as a national centre," and "the restoration of Palestine to the Jewish people," all these phrases are variants of the same idea, viz., the re-creation of Palestine as it was before the days of the dispersion.

    On the other hand, Lord Rothschild, when he speaks of Palestine as "a home where the Jews could speak their own language, have their own education, their own civilization, and religious institutions under the protection of Allied governments," seems to postulate a much less definite form of political existence, one, indeed, which is quite compatible with the existence of an alien (so long as it is not Turkish) government...

    Now what is the capacity as regards population of Palestine within any reasonable period of time? Under the Turks there is no such place or country as Palestine, because it is divided up between the sanjak of Jerusalem and the vilayets of Syria and Beirut. But let us assume that in speaking of Palestine in the present context we mean the old scriptural Palestine, extending from Dan to Beersheba, i.e., from Banias to Bir es-Sabi... . an area of less than 10,000 square miles. What is to become of the people of this country, assuming the Turk to be expelled, and the inhabitants not to have been exterminated by the war? There are over a half a million of these, Syrian Arabs -- a mixed community with Arab, Hebrew, Canaanite, Greek, Egyptian, and possibly Crusaders' blood. They and their forefathers have occupied the country for the best part of 1,500 years. They own the soil, which belongs either to individual landowners or to village communities. They profess the Mohammadan faith. They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants, or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter.

   1. Born in Rumania in 1856, his imposing presence and scholarship combined with "an oracular manner suggesting that he had access to mysteries hidden from others, had made him an important figure at Zionist Congresses and on Zionist platforms in England and abroad." It was calculated that Sykes would be impressed by his personality and background.[116]
   2. These included the socialist leader, Jules Cuesde, who had joined Viviani's National Government as Minister of State; Gustave Herve: the publicist and future Minister de Monzie; and others.
   3. Privately, Sokolow resented Malcolm as "a stranger in the center of our work," who was "endowed with an esprit of a goyish kind. " [130]
   4. Of Jewish extraction.[131]
   5. The French note represented a defeat for the "Syrian Party" in the government who believed in French dominion over the entire area. This was not only due to the strong representations of Sykes on behalf of his Government, but was assisted by those of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, [132] who prevailed upon the Alliance Israélite to back the Zionist cause.
      The result of the no less successful conversations in Rome and the Vatican were cabled to the Zionist Organization over British controlled lines.[133]
   6. The use of the term "National Home" was a continuation of the euphemism deliberately adopted since the first Zionist Congress, when the term "Heimstaette" was used instead of any of the possible German words signifying "state." At that time, its purpose was to avoid provoking the hostility of non-Zionist Jews.[151]
      The author or inventor of the term ''Heimstaette'' was Max Nordau who coined it ''to deceive by its mildness '' until such time as ''there was no reason to dssimulate our real aim." [152]
      The Arabic translation of ''National Home'' ignores the intended subtlety, and the words employed: watan, qawm, and sha'b, are much stronger in meaning than an abstract notion of government.[153]
   7. (1879-1924). His father, the first Lord Swaythling, and Herbert Samuel's father were brothers.
   8. Rufus Isaacs, a Jewish lawyer, who had quickly risen to fame in his profession, and then in politics. This was a period when elevations to the peerage for political and financial assistance to the party in power were so numerous that the whole system of British peerage was weakened. In 1916, Isaacs was a viscount; in 1917 an earl.
   9. Joined Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in 1921. and was responsible for their liaison with London banks, and was "in charge of financing several large enterprises." [160]
  10. This was introduced by Mr. Hamilton Fish. His interpretation of his action was clarified thirty-eight years later, when the World Zionists held their 25th Congress in Jerusalem. David Ben Gurion, as Prime Minister of Israel, in his address to the gathering stated: "every religious Jew has daily violated the precepts of Judaism by remaining in the diaspora"; and, citing the authority of the Jewish sages, said: "Whoever dwells outside the land of Israel is considered to have no god." He added: "Judaism is in danger of death by strangulation. In the free and prosperous countries it faces the kiss of death, a slow and imperceptible decline into the abyss of assimilation." [179]

Mr. Hamilton Fish replied: "As author of the first Zionist Resolution patterned on the Balfour Resolution, I denounce and repudiate the Ben Gurion statements as irreconcilable with my Resolution as adopted by Congress, and if they represent the Government of Israel and public opinion there, then I shall disavow publicly my support of my own Resolution, as I do not want to be associated with such un-American doctrines."[180]

Wilson and the War

If the contract with Jewry was to bring the United States into the Great War in exchange for the promise of Palestine, did they in fact deliver, through Brandeis or anyone else?

For the German-Jewish princes of the purse in the United States, the evidence points more to the Russian revolution being the factor of most weight in determining their attitude.

Was it the resumption of Germany's submarine blockade, the sinking of the Laconia, the Zimmerman telegram, which really influenced Wilson for war? Was it the Zionist counsel of Brandeis? In a careful study, Prof. Alex M. Arnett showed in 1937 that Wilson had decided to put the United States into the war on the side of the Allies many months before the resumption of U-boat warfare by Germany, which was promoted as a sufficient reason.[182]

In the propaganda battle for American public opinion between Britain and Germany, the former had the advantage of language, and the fact that on 5 August 1914 they had cut the international undersea cables linking Germany and the United States, thus eliminating quick communication between those two countries and giving British "news" the edge in forming public opinion.

The success of British propaganda methods were acknowledged by a German soldier of the time when he dictated his memoirs, Mein Kampf, in 1925: "In England propaganda was regarded as a weapon of the first order, whereas with us it represented the last hope of a livelihood for our unemployed politicians and a snug job for shirkers of the modest heroic type. Taken all in all, its results were negative."

British propaganda portrayed the war as one of just defense against a barbarian aggressor akin to the hordes of Genghis Khan, who were rapers of nuns, mutilators of children, led by the Kaiser -- pictured as a beast in human form, a lunatic, deformed monster, modern Judas, and criminal monarch.

Stories that German soldiers cut off the hands of Belgian children and crucified prisoners and perpetrated and all sorts of other atrocities said to have been practiced in Belgium, were circulated as widely as possible. The story about their making glycerine and soap from corpses did not appear until the end of April 1917, when new stories were created by American propagandists. One, a book called Christine, by "Alice Cholmondeley," a collection of letters purporting to have been written by a teenage girl music student to her mother in Britain until her death in 1914, mingled a damning catalogue of alleged German character faults with emotional feelings for her fictitious mother and music. Propaganda experts rated it highly.[183]

The head of the American section of the British propaganda bureau, Sir Gilbert Parker, was able to report on his Success in the issue of his secret Americon Press Review for 11 October 1916 before the Presidential election: ''This week supplies satisfactory evidence of the permeation of the American Press by British influence."

Men of British ancestry still dominated the powerful infrastructure of the economy, filled top Positions in the State Department in the influential Eastern universities, in the communications and cultural media. Britain and France were more identified with democracy and freedom, and the Central Powers with imperial militaristic autocracy. From Oyster Bay, former President Theodore Roosevelt, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, performed high-pitched war dances of words in support of belligerency.

But at the Democratic convention, and in the subsequent campaign, it was William Jennings Bryan and his allied orators who created the theme and slogan: "He kept us out of war."

Bryan had resigned as Secretary of State in June 1915 because he believed Wilson was jeopardizing American neutrality and showing partiality towards England. In his last interview, he told Wilson bitterly, "Colonel House has been Secretary of State, not I, and I have never had your full confidence."

House, a secretive and subtle flatterer who had performed services relating to the Federal Reserve Bank and currency legislation for Jacob W. Schiff and Paul Warburg, was perceived by Wilson as the "friend who so thoroughly understands me," "my second personality....my independent self, His thoughts and mine are one."

Bryan had wanted to go on a peace mission to Europe at the beginning of 1915, but the President sent House instead. House had actually sailed on the British ship Lusitania and as it approached the Irish coast on 5 February, the captain ordered the American flag to be raised.

The Intimate Papers of Colonel House record that on the morning of 7 May 1915, he and the British Foreign Secretary Grey drove to Kew. "We spoke of the probability of an ocean liner being sunk," recorded House, "and I told him if this were done, a flame of indignation would sweep across America, which would in itself probably carry us into the war." An hour later, House was with King George in Buckingham Palace. "We fell to talking, strangely enough,'' the Colonel wrote that night, ''of the probability of Germany sinking a trans-Atlantic liner... " He said, "Suppose they should sink the Lusitania with American passengers on board... "

That evening House dined at the American Embassy. A dispatch came in, stating that at two in the afternoon a German submarine had torpedoed and sunk the Lusitania off the southern coast of Ireland. 1,200 lives were lost, including 128 Americans. It took 60 years for the truth about its cargo to be confirmed; that it had carried munitions which exploded when the torpedo hit. But Secretary of State Bryan remarked to his wife, "I wonder if that ship carried munitions of war... . If she did carry them, it puts a different face on the whole matter! England has been using our citizens to protect her ammunition."

In a telegram to President Wilson from England on 9 May 1915, House said he believed an immediate demand should made to Germany for assurance against a similar incident.

    I should inform her that our Government expected to take measures ... to ensure the safety of American citizens.

    If war follows, it will not be a new war, but an endeavor to end more speedily an old one. Our intervention will save, rather than increase loss of life. We can no longer be neutral spectators .

In another telegram on 25 May, he noted that he had received from Ambassador Gerard a cable that Germany is in no need of food. "This does away with their contention that the starving of Germany justified their submarine policy."

The next day, House lunched with Sir Edward Grey and read him all the telegrams that had passed between the President, Gerard and himself since last they had met. And he wrote on 30 May 1915, "I have concluded that war with Germany is inevitable, and this afternoon at six o'clock I decided to go home on the S.S. St. Paul on Saturday. I sent a cable to the President to this effect." After his arrival in the United States, he wrote to the President from Rosslyn, Long Island, on 16 June 1915, a long letter which included the paragraph:

    I need not tell you that if the Allies fail to win, it must necessarily mean a reversal of our entire policy.

    I think we shall find ourselves drifting into war with Germany ... Regretable as this would be, there would be compensations. The war would be more speedily ended, and we would be in a strong position to aid the other great democracies in turning the world into the right paths. It is something that we have to face with fortitude, being consoled by the thought that no matter what sacrifices we make, the end will ustify them. Affectionately yours, E.M. House.

Are these references related to Zionism or Palestine? I think not. Perhaps the clue is that immediately after the election of Wilson, House had anonymously publisherl a political romance entitled Philip Dru: Administrator. Dru leads a revolt and becomes a dictator in Washington, where he formulates a new American consitution and brings about an international grouping or league of Powers.

Let us look to the other side of the water again in 1916, a year later.

About a month before Malcolm's meeting with Sir Mark Sykes, Lloyd George gave an interview to the President of the United Press Association of America, in which he said "that Britain had only now got into her stride in her war effort, and was justifiably suspicious of any suggestion that President Wilson should choose this moment to 'butt in' with a proposal to stop the war before we could achieve victory."

"The whole world ... must know that there can be no outside interference at this stage. Britain asked no intervention when she was unprepared to fight. She will tolerate none now that she is prepared, until the Prussian military despotism is broken beyond repair... . The motto of the Allies was 'Never Again!' " And this made worthwhile the sacrifices so far as well as those needed to end the war with victory.[184]

Grey wrote to him on the 29th of September that he was apprehensive about the effect "of the warning to Wilson in your interview... . It has always been my view that until the Allies were sure of victory the door should be kept open for Wilson's mediation."

But the following month, at one of the formal regular meetings with the Chief of the Imperial Staff, when Lloyd George received the familiar answers as to the course of the war -- the German losses were greater than the Allies, that the Germans were gradually being worn down, and their morale shaken by constant defeat and retreat -- he asked Sir Wm. Robertson for his views as "to how this sanguinary conflict was to be brought to a successful end ... He just mumbled something about 'attrition'."

Lloyd George then asked for a formal memorandum on the subject. This was not encouraging, and said that an end could not be expected "before the summer of 1918. How long it may go on afterwards I cannot even guess."

The facts were far from rosy, but were the hopes of Great Britain really hanging upon American entry into the war? There were two other possible courses.

One was suggested by the Marquess of Landsdowne, a member of the Cabinet and a statesman of considerable standing as the author of the Entente Cordiale in 1904. It was contained in a Memorandum Respecting a Peace Settlement, circulated to the Cabinet with the consent of the Prime Minister. Landsdowne suggested doubts as to the possibility of victory within a reasonable space of time.

    What does the prolongation of the war mean? Our own casualties already amount to over 1,100,000. We have had 15,000 officers killed, not including those who are missing. There is no reason to suppose that, as the force at the front in the different theatres of war increases, the casualties will increase at a lower rate. We are slowly but surely killing off the best of the male population of these islands. The figures representing the casualties of our Allies are not before me. The total must be appalling.[185]

The other members of the Cabinet and the Chief of Staff repudiated peace without victory.

The other course was that adopted: to thrust more men and money into the holocaust (defined as a wholesale sacrifice or destruction). What would now be called political and military summit meetings were held in France to plan for it. They commenced on 15 November 1916.

In the political presentations, the only reference to America seems to have been offered by Lloyd George:

    The difficulties we have experienced in making payment for our purchases abroad must be as present to the minds of French statesmen as to ourselves. Our dependence upon America is growing for food, raw material and munitions. We are rapidly exhausting the securities negotiable in America. If victory shone on our banners, our difficulties would disappear.[Asquith deleted the next sentence, which read] Success means credit: financiers never hesitate to lend to a prosperous concern: but business which is lumbering along amidst great difficulties and which is making no headway in spite of enormous expenditure will find the banks gradually closing their books against it.

This reference to Allied problems in getting more credit from the bankers in the United States, who were predominantly German-Jewish, elucidates Schiff's agreement to arrange credit for Britain through the Jewish banker Cassel -- they were not waiting for a Balfour Declaration, they were waiting for the Russian Revolution!

On the military side, there was general agreement at the summit conference that what was needed was a ''knock-out blow,'' and it was decided that the 1917 plan of campaign would be an offensive on all fronts, including Palestine, with the Western Front as the principal one.

On 7 December the Asquith government fell and Lloyd George, who was pledged to a more vigorous prosecution of the war, took over the Government. Five days later, Germany and her allies put forward notes in which they stated their willingness to consider peace by compromise and negotiations.

The first of the battles opened on 9 April 1917, heralded by a bombardment of 2,700,000 shells. Another attack was launched by the French nine days later, these resulting in about a million dead and wounded on both sides. The French Army mutinied, and General Petain was put in charge.

At this time the two events which were to twist the world into a new shape were occurring, the Russian Revolution and American entry into the war.

French Government wanted to defer all offensive operations until American assistance became available, but the generals thought otherwise. Maj.-Gen. J.F.C. Fuller, whom I have met, one of the few bright military-political minds in this century, tells us that Haig "had set his heart on a decisive battle in Flanders, and so obsessed was he by it that he believed that he could beat the Germans single-handed, and before the Americans came in." [186] I do not think that people who did not live in the great days of the British Empire can have a sense of the hubris of a Haig, unless one gets it from classical literature. Perhaps today it would be found in the head of the World Bank, from whom we taxpayers, like the common soldiers of that time, are so far removed! There was actually resentment in the England of my boyhood about Americans claiming to have played any significant part in fighting the Great War.

The outcome of the grandiosity of the generals and politicians was the costly Flanders campaign of the summer and autumn. On 7th June it was opened by the limited and successful Battle of Messines, which was preceded by a seventeen days' bombardment of 3,500,000 shells, and initiated by the explosion of nineteen mines packed with a million pounds of high explosives.

On 31st July it was followed by the Third Battle of Ypres, for which the largest force of artillery ever seen in British history was assembled. In all, the preliminary bombardment lasted nineteen days, and during it 4,300,000 shells, some 107,000 tons in weight were hurled onto the prospective low lying battlefield. Its entire surface was upheaved; all drains, dikes, culverts and roads were destroyed, and an almost uncrossable swamp created, in which the infantry wallowed for three and a half months. When, on 10th November, the battle ended, the Germans had been pushed back a maximum depth of five miles on a frontage of ten miles, at a cost of a little under 200,000 men to themselves, and, at the lowest estimate, of 300,000 to their enemy.

Thus ended the last of the great artillery battles of attrition on the Western Front, and when in retrospect they are looked on, it becomes understandable why the politicians were so eager to escape them.

The Great War was like a greatly magnified version of the mutual destruction of noble men in the Niebelungenlied. Set against each other by the vanity and lack of vision of their rulers, the more they fought the more there was to avenge until death delivered them from their need. "At the going down of the sun and in the morning," we should learn their lesson.

Britain's Obligation?

In a memorandum marked in his own handwriting "Private & Confidential" to Lord Peel and other members of the Royal Commission on Palestine in 1936, James Malcolm wrote:

    I have always been convinced that until the Jewish question was more or less satisfactorily settled there could be no real or permanent peace in the world, and that the solution lay in Palestine. This was one of the two main considerations which impelled me, in the autumn of 1916, to initiate the negotiations which led eventually to the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate for Palestine. The other, of course, was to bring America into the War.

    For generations Jews and Gentiles alike have assumed in error that the cause of Anti-Semitism was in the main religious. Indeed, the Jews in the hope of obtaining relief from intolerance, engaged in the intensive and subversive propagation of materialistic doctrines productive of ''Liberalism,'' Socialism, and Irreligion, resulting in de-Christianisation. On the other hand, the more materialistic the Gentiles became, the more aware they were subconsciously made of the cause of Anti-Semitism, which at bottom was, and remains to this day, primarily an economic one. A French writer -- Vicomte de Poncins -- has remarked that in some respects Anti-Semitism is largely a form of self-defence against Jewish economic aggression. In my opinion, however. neither the Jews nor the Gentiles bear the sole responsibility for this.

    As I have already said, I had a part in initiating the negotiations in the early autumn of 1916 between the British and French Governments and the Zionist leaders, which led to the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate for Palestine.

    The first object, of course, was to enlist the very considerable and necessary influence of the Jews, and especially of the Zionist or Nationalist Jews. to help us bring America into the War at the most critical period of the hostilities. This was publicly acknowledged by Mr. Lloyd George during a recent debate in the House of Commons.

    Our second object was to enable and induce Jews all the world over to envisage constructive work as their proper field, and to take their minds off destnictive and subversive schemes which, owing to their general Sense of insecurity and homelessness. even in the periods preceding the French Revolution, had provoked so much trouble and unrest in various countries, until their ever-increasing violence culminated in the Third International and the Russian Communist Revolution. But to achieve this end it was necessary to promise them Palestine in consideration of their help, as already explained, and not as a mere humanitarian experiment or enterprise, as represented in certain quarters.

It is no wonder that Weizmann did not refer to Malcolm in his autobiography, and Sokolow privately resented Malcolm "as a stranger in the center of our work," who was "endowed with an esprit of a goyish kind. " [187]

It is also worth noting that on page seven of his memorandum Malcolm quoted General Ludendorff, former Quartermaster General of the German Army, and perhaps at least remembered for heading an unsuccessful coup in Munich in 1923, as saying that the Balfour Declaration was "the cleverest thing done by the Allies in the way of propaganda and that he wished Germany had thought of it first."

On the other hand, might it not have provided some cold comfort for Ludendorff to believe that the Zionist Jews were a major factor in the outcome of the war -- if that is what he is implying?

Malcolm's belief in the Balfour Declaration as a means of bringing the United States into the war was confirmed by Samuel Landman, secretary to the Zionist leaders Weizmann and Sokolow, and later secretary of the World Zionist Organization. As

    the only way (which proved so to be) to induce the American President to come into the war was to secure the cooperation of Zionist Jews by promising them Palestine, and thus enlist and mobilize the hitherto unsuspectedly powerful forces of Zionist Jews in America and elsewhere in favour of the Allies on a quid pro quo contract basis. Thus, as will be seen, the Zionists having carried out their part, and greatly helped to bring America in, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was but the public confirmation of the necessarily secret "gentlemens' " agreement of 1916, made with the previous knowledge, acquiescence, and or approval of the Arabs, and of the British, and of the French and other Allied governments, and not merely a voluntary, altruistic and romantic gesture on the part of Great Britain as certain people either through pardonable ignorance assume or unpardonable ill-will would represent or rather misrepresent ...[188]

Speaking in the House of Commons on 4 July 1922, Winston Churchill asked rhetorically,

    Are we to keep our pledge to the Zionists made in 1917...? Pledges and promises were made during the war, and they were made, not only on the merits, though I think the merits are considerable. They were made because it was considered they would be of value to us in our struggle to win the war. It was considered that the support which the Jews could give us all over the world, and particularly in the United States, and also in Russia, would be a definite palpable advantage. I was not responsible at that time for the giving of those pledges, nor for the conduct of the war of which they were, when given, an integral part. But like other members I supported the policy of the War Cabinet. Like other members, I accepted and was proud to accept a share in those great transactions, which left us with terrible losses, with formidable obligations, but nevertheless with unchallengable victory.

However, Hansard notes, one member, Mr. Gwynne, plaintively complained that "the House has not yet had an opportunity of discussing it."

Writing to The Times on 2 November 1949, Malcolm Thomson, the official biographer of Lloyd George, noted that this was the thirty-second anniversary of the Balfour Declaration and it seemed a

    suitable occasion for stating briefly certain facts about its origin which have recently been incorrectly recorded.

    When writing the official biography of Lloyd George, I was able to study the original documents bearing on this question. From these it was clear that although certain members of the Cabinets of 1916 and 1917 sympathized with Zionist aspirations, the efforts of Zionist leaders to win any promise of support from the British Government had proved quite ineffectual, and the secret Sykes-Picot agreement with the French for partition of spheres of interest in the Middle East seemed to doom Zionist aims. A change of attitude was, however, brought about through the initiative of Mr. James A. Malcolm, who pressed on Sir Mark Sykes, then Under-Secretary to the War Cabinet, the thesis that an allied offer to restore Palestine to the Jews would swing over from the German to the allied side the very powerful influence of American Jews, including Judge Brandeis, the friend and adviser of President Wilson. Sykes was interested, and at his request Malcolm introduced him to Dr. Weizmann and the other Zionist leaders, and negotiations were opened which culminated in the Balfour Declaration.

    These facts have at one time or another been mentioned in various books and articles, and are set out by Dr. Adolf Boehm in his monumental history of Zionism, "Die Zionistische Bewegung," Vol. 1, p.656. It therefore surprised me to find in Dr. Weizmann's autobiography, "Trial and Error," that he makes no mention of Mr. Malcolm's crucially important intervention, and even attributes his own introduction to Sir Mark Sykes to the late Dr. Caster. As future historians might not unnaturally suppose Dr. Weizmann's account to be authentic, I have communicated with Mr. Malcolm, who not only confirms the account I have given, but holds a letter written to him by Dr. Weizmann on March 5, 1941, saying: "You will be interested to hear that some time ago I had occasion to write to Mr. Lloyd George about your useful and timely initiative in 1916 to bring about the negotiations between myself and my Zionist colleagues and Sir Mark Sykes and others about Palestine and Zionist support of the allied cause in America and elsewhere."

    No doubt a complexity of motives lay behind the Balfour Declaration, including strategic and diplomatic considerations and, on the part of Balfour, Lloyd George, and Smuts, a genuine sympathy with Zionist aims. But the determining factor was the intervention of Mr Malcolm with his scheme for engaging by some such concession the support of American Zionists for the allied cause in the first world war.

    Yours, & c.,

    MALCOLM THOMSON

According to Lloyd George's Memoirs of the Peace Conference, where, as planned many years before, the Zionists were strongly represented,

    There is no better proof of the value of the Balfour Declaration as a military move than the fact that Germany entered into negotiations with Turkey in an endeavor to provide an alternative scheme which would appeal to Zionists. A German-Jewish Society, the V.J.O.D., [A] was formed, and in January 1918, Talaat, the Turkish Grand Vizier, at the instigation of the Germans, gave vague promises of legislation by means of which "all justifiable wishes of the Jews in Palestine would be able to meet their fulfilment."

    Another most cogent reason for the adoption by the Allies of the policy of the Declaration lay in the state of Russia herself. Russian Jews had been secretly active on behalf of the Central Powers from the first; they had become the chief agents of German pacifist propaganda in Russia; by 1917 they had done much in preparing for that general disintegration of Russian society, later recognised as the Revolution. It was believed that if Great Britain declared for the fufillment of Zionist aspirations in Palestine under her own pledge, one effect would be to bring Russian Jewry to the cause of the Entente.

    It was believed, also, that such a declaration would have a potent influence upon world Jewry outside Russia, and secure for the Entente the aid of Jewish financial interests. In America, their aid in this respect would have a special value when the Allies had almost exhausted the gold and marketable securities available for American purchases. Such were the chief considerations which, in 1917, impelled the British Government towards making a contract with Jewry.[189]

As for getting the support of Russian Jewry, Trotsky's aims were to overthrow the Provisional Government and turn the imperialist war into a war of international revolution. In November 1917 the first aim was accomplished. Military factors primarily influenced Lenin to sign the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918.

The Zionist sympathizers Churchill and George seemed never to lose an opportunity to tell the British people that they had an obligation to support the Zionists.

But what had the Zionists done for Britain?

Where was the documentation?

"Measured by British interests alone," wrote the Oxford historian Elizabeth Monroe in 1963, the Balfour Declaration "was one of the greatest mistakes in our imperial history!"

The Zionists had the Herzlian tradition -- shall we call it -- of Promises, "promises." Considerable credit for the diplomacy which brought into existence the Jewish national home must go to Weizmann. A British official who came into contact with him summarized his diplomatic method in the following words:

    When (the First World War) began, his cause was hardly known to the principal statesman of the victors. It had many enemies, and some of the most formidable were amongst the most highly placed of his own people ... He once told me that 2,000 interviews had gone into the making of the Balfour Declaration. With unerring skill he adapted his arguments to the special circumstances of each statesman. To the British and Americans he could use biblical language and awake a deep emotional undertone; to other nationalities he more often talked in terms of interest. Mr. Lloyd George was told that Palestine was a little mountainous country not unlike Wales; with Lord Balfour the philosophical background of Zionism could be surveyed; for Lord Cecil the problem was placed in the setting of a new world organization; while to Lord Milner the extension of imperial power could be vividly portrayed. To me, who dealt with these matters as a junior officer of the General Staff, he brought from many sources all the evidences that could be obtained of the importance of a Jewish national home to the strategical position of the British Empire, but he always indicated by a hundred shades and inflections of the voice that he believed that I could also appreciate better than my superiors other more subtle and recondite arguments.[190]

A) Vereinigung Jüdischer Organisation in Deutschland zur Wahrung der Rechte des Osten. (Alliance of the Jewish Organizations of Germany for the Safeguarding of the Rights of the East.)

Triumph and Tragedy

Herzl correctly predicted a great war between the Great Powers. His followers organized to be ready for that time to further their ambitions through exploiting the rivalry of the Great Powers. They had a vested interest in promoting that war and in its continuance until Palestine was wrested from Turkey by British soldiers.

They prepared for the Peace Conference at Versailles although they had no belligerent standing, but they had the weight of the Rothschilds, Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, and others, which made room for them.

In the Introduction to The Palestine Diary I wrote,

    The establishment in 1948 of a "Jewish state" in Palestine was a phenomenal achievement. In fifty years from the Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, in 1897 -- attended by a small number of Jews who represented little more than themselves -- the Zionist idea had captivated the vast majority of world Jewry, and enlisted in particular Britain, America and the United Nations to intervene in Palestine in its support.

In 1983, seventy-five years after the Balfour Declaration and nearly ninety years after the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland a meeting was held there of the International Conference on the Question of Palestine -- but the conferees were not Jews -- they were Palestinians -- two million are in exile -- displaced by Jews!

Where is the meaning for us?

On a day-to-day level, we can look in our newspapers for Zionist tactics of influence and leverage which we can document they have used successfully in the past.

Then there is a long-term strategy, From the mass of material in a century of history and in our complex society of today I see the underlying effect of two themes, They influence the lives of every one of us, and will continue to do so unless a change is made.

We can see them clearly in their early formulation, before they had been fed as valid data into the information processing and software systems of our society, with the result that most of the answers we get are wrong!

They are found in the conversation of Herzl and Meyer-Cohn in 1895. The sets of ideas are those associated with Jewish nationalism and racism on the Right [191] -- racism being defined by Sir Andrew Huxley P.R.S. as the belief in the subjugation of one race by another, and on the other hand the concept of "universalism."

Acceptance of this input from the Right into our computations has resulted in the transfer of some $50 billion from our pockets into theirs.[192] In 1983, budgeted American tax money, labeled "aid," alone amounts to $625 for every man, woman and child in Israel.[193] It results in our acceptance of concentration camps for Palestinians containing thousands of people without a squeak from the so-called "international community" in acceptance of their assassination, torture, deportation, closing of their schools and colleges, even of their massacre.[194] The lives of American troops -- men and women, are committed to supporting these crimes.[195] Criticism is called "antisemitism," a word which computes as "unemployable social outcast."

Jewish nationalism and Israeli policy planned the present destabilization of Lebanon in 1955.[196] This is part of larger schemes to fragment and enfeeble possible challenges to their supremacy in the Middle East.[197]

On the other hand we have "universalism." This, I believe was the factor motivating Woodrow Wilson through House in his telegram of 30 May 1916 and letter of 16 June 1915 to the President, to which I have referred. "The League of Nations," the United Nations Organization, are its printouts. Just as House was a coefficient of the international bankers, so the United Nations and the international bankers have been part of the coefficient whereby over $400 billion of the earnings of workers in countries where universalism is a significant force, has been transferred to the peoples of Asia, Africa, South America and Communist countries; money needed for our capital investment.

People should ask: How is it that, with such multiplication of industrial power and resources, our peoples' standard of living and possibilities to have and support children have not multiplied accordingly? Why do so many of our women have to work? Why does no public figure -- politician, labor leader -- dare to ask -- and raise the roof?

Universalism and Marxism compete superficially for first place as finalists in western culture distortion. Both promote its ethnic dilution, but deny us the reality of racial differences. Against our individuality and our nationalism, they and the global capitalists and their corporations unite as transnationals to reduce all but themselves to a common consumer market of blurred boundaries and one color. They would like one law -- which they would make; one armed force -- which they would control. Universalism would impose -- not a global peace, but a global tyranny!

Universalism has come up with "interdependence," an expression used as a cover for the expropriation of our earnings as foreign aid in various forms; it has anesthetized the sense of self-defense of our countries so that those who have tried to stop their colonization by people from exploding populations of Africa, Asia and Latin America have been made to feel that they were depriving others of their "human rights."

In countries where they live other than Israel, Zionists are in the forefront of opposition to restrictions on immigration. Note that even in 1903 a leader of the fight against the Alien's Bill and against tightening up naturalization regulations in Britain was the pro-Zionist Winston S. Churchill, and the super-Zionist Herzl appeared before the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration to oppose any restriction.

And yet, my Arab friends born in Jerusalem are cast out and cannot return.

"If," said Herzl, "we wanted to bring about the unity of mankind independent of national boundaries, we would have to combat the ideal of patriotism. The latter, however, will prove stronger than we for innumerable years to come.

In a hundred years they have almost won that struggle.

In a conversation with Joseph Chamberlain in 1903, Theodore Herzl was asked how the Jewish colony would survive in the distant future. Herzl said, "We shall play the role of a small buffer state. We shall attain this not through the goodwill but from the jealousy of the Powers."

This is the game that Israel plays today, obtaining its military supplies, its high technology, and its billions of dollars from the pay packets of American workers, using the rivalry of the USSR and the U.S.A.

We should not allow ourselves to be made pawns in the games of others.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

==================


THE 'ENGLISH' JEW BEHIND THE FOUNDATION OF ISRAEL

It has always been assumed by historians and others
that it was the pro-Zionist US government at the end
of World War Two and earlier that laid the foundations
of the State of Israel.

Admittedly the US did play a decisive role in this but
research carried out recently in Britain by a Jewish
professor has put a very different complexion upon the
prelude to the establishment of a Jewish state in
Palestine.

As in many fateful and fatal policy decisions, the
machinations of the British Foreign Office played a
decisive role in creating bloody mayhem, betrayal and
misery on a monumental scale, not only in Europe but
also in the Middle East.

William Rubenstein, professor of modern history at the
University of Wales, has unearthed an extraordinary
secret from the annals of British Government
concerning the origins of one of the most influential
members of government during the past century.

REMARKABLE CONCEALMENT

"This case is possibly the most remarkable example of
concealment of identity in 20th Century British
political history," commented Professor Rubenstein in
'History Today' magazine.

Rubenstein was referring to Leopold Amery, a leading
Conservative politician, close ally and friend of
Britain's un-elected wartime leader, Winston
Churchill. Amery was the author of the infamous 1917
Balfour Declaration, which promised British government
support for the Jewish rape and colonisation of the
Palestinian nation.

Amery throughout his life deliberately concealed his
Jewish origins and Professor Rubenstein who is himself
Jewish, has established the deception beyond any
doubt. In his disclosures about Leopold Amery's past
Professor Rubenstein says that Amery misled people
about his past in his autobiography, 'My Political
Life' which was published just before his death in
1955.

In this book Amery declared that his father, Charles
Frederick Amery, came from an old English West Country
family. However, according to the historian he sought
to conceal his mother's origins. Amery merely wrote
that his mother, Elizabeth Leitner Amery was one of a
stream of Hungarian exiles who emigrated after the
1848 European revolutionary turmoil, fleeing first to
Constantinople (Istanbul) and then to England.

FROM THE HUNGARIAN GHETTO

In fact, according to this new research, Amery's
mother was born in 1841 to Jewish parents in Pest,
which subsequently became part of Budapest. This area
of the Hungarian capital was host to the Jewish ghetto
and her own mother's name was Elisabeth Johanna
Saphir, a common Jewish name in the region.

Professor Rubenstein says that Amery also changed his
middle name Moritz to the more Anglicised Maurice in
his full name, Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Amery.
He did so to further disguise his Jewish origins.

Amery's mother was of pure Jewish descent says the
learned historian and therefore, according to orthodox
rabbinical Jewish law and tradition so was her son.
Amery's actions and psychotic anti-German hysteria
expressed during both World Wars and the intervening
years left no doubt as to where his anti-Christian
sympathies lay.

As the Assistant Secretary to England's War Cabinet in
1917 it was the deceitful pretend-Englishman Amery who
drafted the now notorious blood-document, the Balfour
Declaration, which was delivered by Lord Balfour, the
then British Foreign Secretary.

It was the same hapless Lord Balfour who on behalf of
the British Government signed the equally disastrous
and infamous Versailles Diktat, which was to lead
directly to the British declaration of war against
Germany, the consequences of which left Europe in
ruins.

EVIL DOCUMENT

This, the Balfour Report, was a momentously evil
document, was in effect the founding Charter for the
State of Israel and what can be described as the
ensuing Palestinian holocaust.

Amery thus had an overwhelming racial self-interest as
opposed to British interest, in promulgating this.
He also founded the so-called Jewish Legion, the first
racially exclusive Jewish fighting force created since
Roman times. The Jewish Legion was composed of
battalions of Jewish soldiers who were trained and
served under superior British officers during the
First World War.

This force was a forerunner to the present Israeli
Army. Many of its members deserted, attracted by the
opportunity to vent their piratical bloodlust on the
displaced Palestinian population. During the Israelis
anti-Palestinian pogroms tens of thousands of
Palestinians, many of them of Christian faith, were
uprooted and driven from their homelands of centuries.
Tens of thousands died of brutality, starvation and
in numerous Jewish slaughter orgies. Entire villages
such as Deir Yassin were wiped off the map.

JEWISH TERRORISM LEADS TO HOLOCAUST

Few were spared. Even their British allies were
slaughtered; captured, held hostage, hanged and often
their lifeless bodies booby-trapped. The most
notorious terrorist outrage was the bombing of the
King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 105 Britons,
many of them women and children, lost their lives to
Jewish terrorism. Such terrible events have since
been conveniently air-brushed out of history books.
Surprisingly, Amery's openly pro-Jewish sentiments and
collaboration failed to raise eyebrows among British
Government colleagues, some of whom like Sir Anthony
Eden who were known to be strongly anti-Semitic.
Presumably such politicians regarded the Asiatic
Amery's actions favourable to British interests at the
time. It is for this reason that much of the Arab
world despises Britain today, an alienation, which
costs billions of pounds and tens of thousands of jobs
in lost trade and favoured nation status.

During the Conservative Government of Sir Stanley
Baldwin 1925 " 1929, when he was Secretary of State
for Dominion Affairs, Amery was actively one of the
promoters of the greatest growth of British Jewry's
exploitation of commercial, financial and political
opportunity throughout the world. Yet, he disguised
his own Jewishness so effectively that few of his
parliamentary and government colleagues were aware
that he was in fact Jewish or of where his true
allegiances lay.

AMERY DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY

However the act for which he is best known and often
heralded by the English establishment's apologists 'as
a true Englishman came in May 1940. Amery played a
decisive role in bringing down Neville Chamberlain's
government, which sought peace in Europe. It was
Amery who with the impudence of the successful
infiltrator made a war-provoking speech in the House
of Commons: "Depart, I say. Let us have done with
you. In the name of God, go!"

It signalled the departure of the 'Peace in Europe'
section of the Conservative Party and opened the door
to those who fervently desired war with Germany, the
removal of a trade competitor and the opportunity to
loot Europe's most prosperous nation. More than half
of this pro-war section had shares in munitions
factories.

Amery, as a secret Jew, had good reason to hate and
loathe Neville Chamberlain, the alleged appeaser of
Germany's conciliatory leader. Chamberlain was one
of the last, if not the last, of the old style
gentlemen of honour and decency in British Government.

"JEWS PUSHING BRITAIN INTO THIS WAR."

Amery neither forgot nor forgave Chamberlain's bitter
words in September 1939 when he said to his Foreign
Secretary, Lord Halifax. "The Jews of America are
pushing us into this war . . . . "

And so it was, Amery and the Conservative Party's 'War
with Germany' faction led by Winston Churchill,
resolved to ignore Germany proposals for peace and
plunged Britain into a global conflict which became
the bloodiest in the history of the human race. It
was a conflict which delivered half of Europe to the
dictatorship of Jewish-Communism and the Palestinian
nation to the emerging Jewish empire.

Professor Rubenstein says he made the discovery by
following a hunch he had had for years. In his
article in History Today he says: "I was about 75%
certain of what I was likely to find before I started
looking. Knowing both the relevant Jewish and British
sources well, with some lateral thinking, I managed to
piece together the whole story with little real
difficulty.

An ironic piece of history is that John Amery,
Leopold's estranged son was a British Fascist who had
gone to live in Germany where he remained when Britain
declared war on the German nation.

In the early forties John Amery made a few radio
broadcasts from Berlin calling for peace between the
two countries and the ousting of the British autocrat,
Winston Churchill and his warmongering gang.

VENGEANCE SWIFT AND BRUTAL

Vengeance was swift and brutal. At the end of the war
he was arrested in Italy, brought back to England in
chains, tried and hanged as a 'traitor', his body
being unceremoniously hurled into a lime pit within
the confines of London's Pentonville Prison. The
executioner, Albert Pierrepoint later said that John
Amery was one of the bravest men he had ever executed.
Whether John Amery knew of his father's past and
origin remains uncertain although Professor Rubenstein
inclines to the view that he did. His younger
brother, also John, became a senior figure in British
post-war governments and died several years ago
maintaining silence until the end about his family's
Hungarian-Jew origins.

Professor Rubenstein sought the reasons for Amery's
reluctance to identify his Jewish roots. This was a
period in English history when many, even those in the
English establishment, held those of Jewish race in
loathing often contempt.

He suggests that one reason for the cover-up was the
driving ambition to break into English society
demonstrated by Amery's Jewish mother, and also the
fear of embarrassment that knowledge of his Jewish
ness might have caused him at the 'elitist' private
school Harrow where outwardly at least he ingratiated
himself as a 'fervent English nationalist.'

Rubenstein points out also that most of those
especially in public life who then and now hide
their Jewish ancestry, also took pains to distance
themselves as far as possibly from overt interest in
Jewish issues. Some would even proclaim anti-Semitism.
Leopold Moritz Amery chose to present himself as a
great English patriot whilst at the same time serving
the interests of where his true loyalties lay, Israel
and Judah, side by side with those other cultist
sycophants of Zionism, Winston Churchill and F.D
Roosevelt.

Sources: History Today magazine. February 1999.

A Vivian Bird / Michael Walsh Report
www.ety.com/HRP

http://sos-at.blogspot.com/2008/03/jew- ... s-264.html