[Z] Privately, Sokolow resented Malcolm as “a stranger in the center of our work,” who was “endowed with an esprit of a goyish kind. ” [130] [AA] Of Jewish extraction.[131] [BB] 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] [CC] 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 dissimulate 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] [DD] (1879-1924). His father, the first Lord Swaythling, and Herbert Samuel’s father were brothers.
[EE] 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.
[FF] 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] [GG] 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]
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 American 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, and 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 … Regrettable 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 justify 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 published a political romance entitled Philip Dru: Administrator. Dru leads a revolt and becomes a dictator in Washington, where he formulates a new American constitution 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 destructive 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 unchallengeable 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
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