Frank wrote on Jul 11
th, 2025 at 10:41pm:
Mr. Balfour's private thoughts were much with Zionism. At no time, as far as the annals disclose, did he give thought to the native inhabitants of Palestine, whose expulsion into the wilderness he was to cause... Dr. Weizmann, forty years later, recorded that the Mr. Balfour whom he met "had only the most naive and rudimentary notion of the movement"; he did not even know Dr. Herzl's name, the nearest he could get to it being "Dr. Herz". Mr. Balfour was already carried away by his enthusiasm for the unknown cause. He posed formal objections, but apparently only for the pleasure of hearing them overborne, as might a girl object to the elopement she secretly desires.
-- Douglas Reed,
The Controversy of Zion, Chapter 28: The Aberration of Mr. Balfour
According to W.J.M. Childs, in,
A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, v. 6, p. 172-73 (published under the auspices of the British Institute for International Affairs in 1924):
It is possible to understand from many sources that directly, and indirectly, the services expected of Jewry were not expected in vain, and were, from the point of view of British interests alone, well worth the price which had to be paid. Nor is it to be supposed that the services already rendered are the last—it may well be that in time to come Jewish support will much exceed any thought possible in the past.What were "the services expected of Jewry" that were "not expected in vain" and were "well worth the price"? In 1936, Samuel Landman let the cat out of the bag with a pamphlet entitled
Great Britain, the Jews and Palestine. Landman had been in Weizmann’s circle during the war—a point easily ascertainable from biographies of Weizmann—and was in a position to know what had gone on between the Zionists and the British government.
Landman’s pamphlet was addressed to the British government. His complaint was that in 1916 there had been what he called a "gentleman’s agreement" between the Zionists and the British government; that the Zionists had fully upheld their own end of the agreement; and that now, 20 years later, the British had yet to deliver Palestine.
According to Landman, the Zionist quid pro quo for the Balfour Declaration was nothing less than to "induce the American President to come into the War" on the British side. Landman complained that this wartime service to the British accounted "in no small measure" for Nazi anti-Semitism, and warned that if the British didn’t deliver a Jewish state in Palestine, the Jews in their despair might try to "pull down the pillars of civilisation."
Landman’s argument was in part that the British, having turned Jews into mortally endangered pariahs in Nazi Germany, had a moral obligation to extricate them. Similar moral-obligation arguments have recently been addressed to the U.S.—for example on behalf of Shiites and Kurds who rebelled against Saddam Hussein in response to American encouragement after the First Gulf War, and then found in the face of mass slaughter that the expected U.S. assistance was a chimera.
Landman’s words about pulling down "the pillars of civilisation," moreover, might have been taken as a threat that the Jews, having brought down two cousins of the English royal house, the czar and the kaiser, would turn next on the Nazi-sympathizer Edward VIII, then in the one partial year of his reign.
Landman’s pamphlet is a tale of double betrayal, first Zionist betrayal of the Germans—on whose side the Jews had first been—and then British betrayal of the Jews. The British had found their promise hard to keep. That was because of entirely understandable Arab resistance, amply forecast by the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky warned in his famous essay "The Iron Wall" (1923) that there had never been a people who had submitted willingly to colonization of their homeland, and that the Arabs in Palestine would not be the first. Nor was Jabotinsky’s warning new even in 1923. See Nur Masalha,
Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (1992), and Masalha,
The Politics of Denial (2003).
In 1997, John Cornelius argued persuasively in the
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs that the Zionists—having every incentive to guarantee British victory—brought the U.S. into the war in 1917 by leaking to British intelligence either the plain text of the Zimmermann Telegram or, more likely, the code in which it was encrypted. The Zimmermann Telegram, from the foreign office in Berlin to the German embassy in Mexico City, suggested that if the U.S. came in on the British side, Mexico be encouraged to "reconquer" its "lost territory" of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
-- Nicholas Lysson,
On The Origins of The Balfour Declaration, May 2006