THE CONTROVERSY OF ZION
BY DOUGLAS REED
Chapter 30
BY DOUGLAS REED
Chapter 30
THE DECISIVE BATTLE
The 1914-1918 war was the first war of nations, as distinct from armies; the hands that directed it
reached into every home in most European, and many non-European countries, This was a new thing in the
world, but it was foretold by the conspirators of Communism and Zionism. The Protocols of 1905 said that
resistance to the plan therein unfolded would be met by "universal war"; Max Nordau in 1903 said that the
Zionist ambition in Palestine would be achieved through "the coming world war".
If such words were to be fulfilled, and thus to acquire the status of "uncanny knowledge" revealed in
advance of the event, the conspiracy had to gain control of the governments involved so that their acts of
State policy, and in consequence their military operations, might be diverted to serve the ends of the
conspiracy, not national interests. The American president was already (i.e., from 1912) the captive of secret
"advisers", as has been shown; and if Mr. House's depictment of him (alike in the anonymous novel and the
acknowledged Private Papers) is correct, he fits the picture given in the earlier Protocols, ". . . we replaced the
ruler by a caricature of a president, taken from the mob, from the midst of our puppet creatures, our slaves".
However, Mr. Wilson was not required to take much active part in furthering the great "design" in the
early stages of the First World War; he fulfilled his function later. At its start the main objective was to gain
control of the British Government. The struggle to do this lasted two years and ended in victory for the
intriguers, whose activities were unknown to the public masses. This battle, fought in the "labyrinth" of
"international politics", was the decisive battle of the First World War. That is to say (as no decision is ever
final, and can always be modified by a later decision), it produced the greatest and most enduring effects on
the further course of the 20th Century; these effects continued to dominate events between the wars and
during the Second World War, and in 1956 may be seen to form the most probable cause of any third
"universal war". No clash of arms during the 1914-1918 war produced an effect on the future comparable
with that brought about by the capture of the British Government in 1916. This process was hidden from the
embroiled masses. From start to finish Britons believed that they had only to do with an impetuous Teutonic
warlord, and Americans, that the incorrigible quarrelsomeness of European peoples was the root cause of the
upheaval.
In England in 1914 the situation brought about in America by the secret captivity of President Wilson
did not prevail. The leading political and military posts were held by men who put every proposal for the
political and military conduct of the war to one test: would it help win the war and was it in their country's
interest. By that test Zionism failed. The story of the first two years of the four-year war is that of the struggle
behind the scenes to dislodge these obstructive men and to supplant them by other, submissive men.
Before 1914 the conspiracy had penetrated-only into antechambers (apart from the Balfour
Government's fateful step in 1903). After 1914 a widening circle of leading men associated themselves with
the diversionary enterprise, Zionism. Today the "practical considerations" (of public popularity or hostility,
votes, financial backing and office) which influence politicians in this matter are well known, because they
have been revealed by many authentic publications. At that time, a politician in England must have been
exceptionally astute or far-sighted to see in the Zionists the holders of the keys to political advancement.
Therefore the Balfourean motive of romantic infatuation may have impelled them; the annals are unclear at
that period and do not explain the unaccountable. Moreover, the English have always tended to give their
actions a guise of high moral purpose, and to persuade themselves to believe in it; this led Macaulay to
observe that "we know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality". Possibly, then, some of the men who joined in this intrigue (which it undoubtedly was) thought they
were doing right. This process of self-delusion is shown by the one statement, discoverable by me, which
clearly identifies a group of pro-Zionists in high English places at that time, and offers a motive of the kind
satirized by Lord Macaulay.
This comes from a Mr. Oliver Locker-Lampson, early in this century a Conservative Member of
parliament. He played no great part and was notable, if at all, only for his later, fanatical support of Zionism
in and outside parliament, but he was a personal friend of the leading men who fathered Zionism on the
British people. In 1952, in a London weekly journal, he wrote:
"Winston, Lloyd George, Balfour and I were brought up vigorous Protestants, who believe in the
coming of a new Saviour when Palestine returns to Jews". This is the Messianic idea of Cromwell's
Millenarians, foisted on the 20th Century. Only the men named could say if the statement is true, and but one
of them survives. Whether this is the true basis of Protestantism, vigorous or otherwise, readers may judge
for themselves. None will contend that it is a sound basis for the conduct of State policy or military
operations in war. Also, of course, it expresses the same impious idea that moved the Prophet Monk and all
such men: that God has forgotten his duty and, having defaulted, must have it done for him. Anyway, a
group had formed and we may as well use for it the name which this man gave it: the Vigorous Protestants.
The First World War began, with these Vigorous Protestants ambitious to attain power so that they
might divert military operations in Europe to the cause of procuring Palestine for the Zionists. Dr.
Weizmann, who had not been idle since we last saw him closeted with Mr. Balfour at Manchester in 1906, at
once went into action: "now is the time. . . the political considerations will be favourable", he wrote in
October 1914. He sought out Mr. C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, which was much addicted
(then as now) to any non- native cause. Mr. Scott was enchanted to learn that his visitor was "a Jew who hated Russia" (Russia,
England's ally, at that moment was saving the British and French armies in the west by attacking from the
east) and at once took him to breakfast with Mr. Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Lloyd
George (whom Dr. Weizmann found "extraordinarily flippant" about the war in Europe) was "warm and
encouraging" about Zionism and suggested another meeting with Mr. Balfour. This ensued on December 14,
1914. Mr. Balfour, recalling the 1906 conversation, "quite nonchalantly" asked if he could help Dr. Weizmann
in any practical way, receiving the answer, "Not while the guns are roaring; when the military situation
becomes clearer I will come again" (Mrs. Dugdale, with whose account Dr. Weizmann's agrees: "I did not
follow up this opening, the time and place were not propitious". This was the meeting at which Mr. Balfour
gratuitously said that "when the guns stop firing you may get your Jerusalem").
Dr. Weizmann did not grasp eagerly at Mr. Balfour's "quite nonchalant" offer for a good reason. The
Zionist headquarters at that moment was in Berlin and Dr. Weizmann's colleagues there were convinced that
Germany would win the war. Before they put any cards on the table they wished to be sure about that. When,
later, they resolved to stake on the Allied card, "the guns" were still "roaring". Dr. Weizmann was not
deterred by thought of the carnage in Europe from "following up the opening". As he truly told Mr. Balfour
(and Mr. Balfour certainly did not understand just what was in his visitor's mind), "the time. . . was not
propitious", and Dr. Weizmann meant to wait "until the military situation becomes clearer".
Significantly, some of the men concerned in these publicly-unknown interviews seem to have sought
to cover up their dates; at the time the fate of England was supposed to be their only preoccupation. I have
already given one apparent instance of this: the confusion about the date of Mr. Balfour's second meeting
with Dr. Weizmann, the one just described. Mr. Lloyd George, similarly, wrote that his first meeting with Dr.
Weizmann occurred in 1917, when he was Prime Minister, and called it a "chance" one. Dr: Weizmann
disdainfully corrected this: "actually Mr. Lloyd George's advocacy of the Jewish homeland long predated his
accession to the premiership and we had several meetings in the intervening years".
A third meeting with Mr. Balfour followed, "a tremendous talk which lasted several hours" and went
off "extraordinarily well". Dr. Weizmann, once more, expressed his "hatred for Russia", England's hardpressed ally. Mr. Balfour mildly wondered "how a friend of England could be so anti-Russian when Russia
was doing so much to help England win the war". As on the earlier occasion, when he alluded to the anti-Zionist convictions of British Jews, he seems to have had no true intention to remonstrate, and concluded,
"It is a great cause you are working for; you must come again and again".
Mr. Lloyd George also warned Dr. Weizmann that "there would undoubtedly be strong opposition
from certain Jewish quarters" and Dr. Weizmann made his stock reply, that in fact "rich and powerful Jews were for the most part against us". Strangely, this insinuation seems greatly to have impressed the Vigorous
Protestants, who were mostly rich and powerful men, and they soon became as hostile to their fellow countrymen, the Jews of England, as their importuner, Dr. Weizmann from Russia.
Opposition to Zionism developed from another source. In the highest places still stood men who
thought only of national duty and winning the war. They would not condone "hatred" of a military ally or
espouse a wasteful "sideshow" in Palestine. These men were Mr. Herbert Asquith (Prime Minister), Lord
Kitchener (Secretary for War), Sir Douglas Haig (who became Commander-in-Chief in France), and Sir
William Robertson (Chief-of-Staff in France, later Chief of the Imperial General Staff).
Mr. Asquith was the last Liberal leader in England who sought to give "Liberalism" a meaning
concordant with national interest and religious belief, as opposed to the meaning which the term has been
given in the last four decades (the one attributed to it by the Protocols: "When we introduced into the State
organism the poison of Liberalism its whole political complexion underwent a change; States have been
seized with a mortal illness, blood-poisoning . . ."). With his later overthrow Liberalism, in the first sense, died
in England; and in fact the party itself fell into decline and collapsed, leaving only a name used chiefly as
"cover" by Communism and its legion of "utopian dreamers".
Mr. Asquith first learned of the intrigue that was brewing when he received a proposal for a Jewish
state in Palestine from a Jewish minister, Mr. Herbert Samuel, who had been present at the Weizmann-Lloyd
George breakfast in December 1914; these two were informed of it beforehand. Mr. Asquith wrote, ". . .
Samuel's proposal in favour of the British annexation of Palestine, a country of the size of Wales, much of it
barren mountain and part of it waterless. He thinks we might plant in this not very promising territory about
three or four million Jews. . . I am not attracted to this proposed addition to our responsibilities. . . The only other
partisan of this proposal is Lloyd George, and I need not say that he does not care a damn for the Jews or
their part of the future. . ."
Mr. Asquith (who correctly summed-up Mr. Lloyd George) remained of the same opinion to the end.
Ten years later, when long out of office, he visited Palestine, and wrote, "This talk of making Palestine a
Jewish National Home seems to me just as fantastic as it has always been". In 1915, by his adverse response,
he made himself, and his removal from office, the object of the intrigue. As long as he could he kept his
country out of the Palestinian adventure; he accepted the opinion of the military leaders, that the war could
only be won (if at all) on the main battlefield, in Europe.
Lord Kitchener, who held this view, was of immense authority and public popularity. The paramount
military objective at that stage, he held, was to keep Russia in the war (the Zionists wanted Russia's
destruction and so informed the Vigorous Protestants). Lord Kitchener was sent to Russia by Mr. Asquith in
June 1916. The cruiser Hampshire, and Lord Kitchener in it, vanished. Good authorities concur that he was
the one man who might have sustained Russia. A formidable obstacle, both to the world-revolution there and
to the Zionist enterprise, disappeared. Probably Zionism could not have been foisted on the West, had he
lived. I remember that the soldiers on the Western Front, when they heard the news, felt that they had lost a
major battle. Their intuition was truer than they knew.
After that only Asquith, Robertson, Haig and the Jews of England stood between Zionism and its
goal. The circle of intrigue widened. The Times and Sunday Times joined the Manchester Guardian in its
enthusiasm for Zionism, and in or around the Cabinet new men added themselves to Balfour and Lloyd
George. Lord Milner (about to join it) announced that "if the Arabs think that Palestine will become an Arab
country they are much mistaken"; at that moment Colonel Lawrence was rousing the Arabs to revolt against
an enemy of the Allies, the Turk. Mr. Philip Kerr (Later Lord Lothian, at that time Mr. Lloyd George's
amanuensis) decided that "a Jewish Palestine" must come out of the chastisement of "the mad dog in Berlin"
(as the Kaiser was depicted to "the mob"). Sir Mark Sykes, Chief Secretary of the War Cabinet, was "one of
our greatest finds" (Dr. Weizmann), and broadened the idea into "the liberation of the Jews, the Arabs and
the Armenians".
By means of such false suggestions is "the multitude" ever and again "persuaded". The Arabs and
Armenians were where they always had been and did not aspire to be removed else whither. The Jews in
Europe were as free or unfree as other men; the Jews of Palestine had demonstrated their eagerness to go to
Uganda, the Jews of Europe and America wanted to stay where they were, and only the Judaized Khazars of
Russia, under their Talmudic directors, wanted possession of Palestine. Sir Mark's invention of this formula
was one more misfortune for posterity, for it implied that the Palestinian adventure was but one of several, all akin. Unlike the other Vigorous Protestants, he was an expert in Middle Eastern affairs and must have known
better.
Another recruit, Lord Robert Cecil, also used this deceptive formula, "Arabia for the Arabs, Judea for
the Jews, Armenia for the Armenians" (Armenian liberation was quite lost sight of in the later events), and his
case also is curious, for statesmanship is inborn in the Cecils. Zionism had strange power to produce
aberrations in wise men. Mr. Balfour (a half Cecil) had a Cecilian wisdom in other matters; he produced a
paper on the reorganization of Europe after the war which stands today as a model of prudent statesmanship,
whereas in the question of Zionism he was as a man drugged.
Lord Cecil's case is similarly unaccountable. I remember a lecture he gave in Berlin (in the 1930's)
about the League of Nations. Tall, stooped, hawk-visaged, ancestrally gifted, he uttered warnings about the
future as from some mountain-top of revelation, and sepulchrally invoked "the Hebrew prophets". As a
young journalist I was much impressed without comprehending what he meant. Today, when I have learned a
little, it is still mysterious to me; if Jeremiah, for instance, was anything he was an anti-Zionist.
Yet Dr. Weizmann says specifically of Lord Robert, "To him the re-establishment of a Jewish
Homeland in Palestine and the organization of the world in a great federation were complementary features of the next step in
the management of human affairs. . . One of the founders of the League of Nations, he considered the Jewish Homeland to be of
equal importance with the League itself".
Here the great secret is out; but did Lord Robert discern it? The conquest of Palestine for the Zionists
from Russia was but "the next step" in "the management of human affairs" (Lord Acton's dictum about "the
design" and "the managers" recurs to mind). The "world federation" is depicted as a concurrent part of the
same plan. The basic theory of that league, in its various forms, has proved to be that nations should surrender
their sovereignty, so that separate nationhood will disappear (this, of course, is also the basic principle of the
Protocols). But if nations are to disappear, why should the process of their obliteration begin with the
creation of one new nation, unless it is to be the supreme authority in "the management of human affairs"
(this conception of the one supreme nation runs alike through the Old Testament, the Talmud, the Protocols
and literal Zionism).
Thus Lord Robert's espousal of Zionism becomes incomprehensible, for his inherited wisdom made
him fully aware of the perils of world-despotism and at that very period he wrote to Mr. House in America:
"That we ought to make some real effort to establish a peace machinery when this war is over, I have
no doubt. . . One danger seems to me to be that too much will be aimed at . . . . . Nothing did more harm to
the cause of peace than the breakdown of the efforts after Waterloo in this direction. It is now generally
forgotten that the Holy Alliance was originally started as a League to Enforce Peace. Unfortunately, it allowed its
energies to be diverted in such a way that it really became a league to uphold tyranny, with the consequence that it
was generally discredited, besides doing infinite harm in other ways . . . The example shows how easily the best
intended schemes may come to grief".
The quotation shows that Lord Cecil should have been aware of the danger of "diverting energies"; it
also shows that he misunderstood the nature of Zionism, if the opinion attributed to him by Dr. Weizmann is
correct. When he wrote these words, a new "'League to Enforce Peace" was being organized in America by
Mr. House's own brother-in-law. Dr. Mezes; it was the precursor of the various world-government flotations
that have followed, in which the intention of powerful groups to set up "a league to uphold tyranny" in the world has been plainly revealed.
Thus, as the second twelvemonth of the First World War ended, the Vigorous Protestants, who looked
toward Palestine, not Europe, were a numerous band of brothers, husking the Russian-Zionist core. Messrs.
Leopold Amery, Ormsby-Gore and Ronald Graham joined the "friends" above named. Zionism had its foot
in every department of government save the War Office. Whatever the original nature of their enthusiasm for
Zionism, material rewards at this stage undeniably beckoned; the intrigue was aimed at dislodging men from
office and taking their places.
The obstructive prime minister, Mr. Asquith, was removed at the end of 1916. The pages of yesterday
now reveal the way this was done, and the passage of time enables the results to be judged. The motive
offered to the public masses was that Mr. Asquith was ineffective in prosecuting the war. The sincerity of the
contention may be tested by what followed; the first act of his successors was to divert forces to Palestine
and in the sequence to that Mr. Lloyd George nearly lost the war entirely.
On November 25, 1916 Mr. Lloyd George recommended that his chief retire from the chairmanship
of the War Council in favour of Mr. Lloyd George. Normally such a demand would have been suicidal, but
this was a coalition government and the Liberal Mr. Lloyd George was supported in his demand by the
Conservative leaders, Mr. Bonar Law and Sir Edward Carson, so that it was an ultimatum. (These two
presumably had honest faith in Mr. Lloyd George's superior abilities; they cannot be suspected of Tory
duplicity deep enough to foresee that he would ultimately destroy the Liberal Party!)
Mr. Lloyd George also required that the incompetent (and Conservative) Mr. Balfour be ousted from
the First Lordship of the Admiralty. The Liberal prime minister indignantly refused either to surrender the
War Council or to dismiss Mr. Balfour (December 4). He then received Mr. Balfour's resignation, whereon he at
once sent Mr. Balfour a copy of his own letter refusing to dismiss Mr. Balfour. Thereon Mr. Balfour, though
kept indoors by a bad cold, found strength to send another letter in which he insisted on resigning, as Mr.
Lloyd George had demanded, and Mr. Lloyd George also resigned:
Mr. Asquith was left alone. On December 6 Mr. Balfour (resigned at Mr. Lloyd George's dictate) felt well
enough to receive Mr. Lloyd George. That afternoon the party leaders met and announced that they would
gladly serve under Mr. Balfour. Mr. Balfour declined but offered gladly to serve under Mr. Lloyd George. Mr.
Lloyd George then became Prime Minister and appointed the incompetent Mr. Balfour Foreign Secretary.
Thus the two men privily committed to support Zionism moved into the highest political offices and from
that moment the energies of the British Government were directed to the procurement of Palestine for the
Zionists above all other purposes. (In 1952 I read a letter in the Jewish journal Commentary, of New York, intimating that the Jews of North Wales had by their votes played the
decisive part in effecting Mr. Lloyd George's election. I am credibly informed, also, that in his attorney's
practice he received much Zionist business, but cannot myself vouch for that. In his case the explanation of
venal motives cannot be discounted, in my judgment; the inaccuracy of his statements about his relations
with Zionism, which Dr. Weizmann twice corrects, is suggestive).
Thus the central figures on the stage regrouped themselves. Mr. Lloyd George, a small, smart-lawyer in
a cutaway among taller colleagues, many still in the old frock coat, looked like a cocksparrow among crows.
Beside him stood Mr. Balfour, tall, limp, ever ready with a wearily cynical answer to an honest question, given
to a little gentle tennis; I see him now, strolling dreamily across Saint James's Park to the House. Around
these two, the Greek chorus of cabinet ministers, junior ministers and high officials who had discovered their
Vigorous Protestantism. Some of these fellow-travellers of Zion may have been honestly deluded, and not
have realized in what chariot they rode. Mr. Lloyd George was the first major figure in a long line of others
who knew a band-wagon when they saw one; through them the innocent words, "twentieth century
politician", gained an ominous meaning and the century owes much of its ordeal to them.
As to the diversion of British military strength to an alien purpose, one stout resistant alone remained
after the death of Lord Kitchener and removal of Mr. Asquith. The sturdy figure of Sir William Robertson
faced the group around Mr. Lloyd George. Had he joined it, he could have had titles, receptions, freedoms,
orders, gilt boxes, and ribbons down to his waistbelt; he could have had fortunes for "the rights" of anything
he wrote (or any ghost for him); he could have had boulevards named after him and have paraded through
cheering cities in Europe and America; he could have had Congress and the House of Commons rise to him
and have entered Jerusalem on a white horse. He did not even receive a peerage, and is rare among British
field marshals in this.
He was the only man ever to have risen to that highest rank from private. In England of the small
professional army this was a great achievement. He was simple, honest, heavy, rugged in feature; he was of
the people and looked like a handsome sergeant-major. His only support, in his struggle, lay in the
commander in France, Sir Douglas Haig, who was of the cavalry officer caste, good looking and soldierly, the
private soldier's ideal of what an officer should bee. Robertson, the gruff old soldier, had (reluctantly) to
attend some of the money-raising festivities with which society ladies, in wartime, keep themselves occupied,
and at one such saw Lady Constance Stewart Richardson, who felt moved to perform dances in the draperies
and manner of Isadora Duncan. A general, noticing Robertson's impatience, said, "You must admit she has a
very fine leg". "Umph, just like any other damn leg", growled Robertson.
On this last man felt the task of thwarting the diversion of British armies to Palestine, if he could. He considered all proposals exclusively in their military bearing on the war and
victory; if it would help win the war, motive was to him indifferent; if it would not, he opposed it without
regard for any other consideration. On that basis he decided that the Zionist proposal was for a dangerous "sideshow" which could only delay and imperil victory. He never discussed and may not even have suspected
any political implications; these were irrelevant to him.
He had told Mr. Asquith in 1915, "Obviously the most effective method" (of defeating the Central
Powers) "is to defeat decisively the main German armies, which are still on the Western Front". Therefore he counselled
urgently against,"auxiliary campaigns in minor theatres and the depletion of the forces in France. . . The one touchstone by
which all plans and proposals must be tested is their bearing on the object of the war".
Peoples engaged in war, are fortunate if their leaders reason like this, and unfortunate if they deviate
from this reasoning. By that conclusive logic the Palestinian enterprise (a political one) was out. When Mr.
Lloyd George became prime minister he at once bent all his efforts on diverting strength to a major campaign
in Palestine: "When I formed my government I at once raised with the War Office the question of a further
campaign into Palestine. Sir William Robertson, who was most anxious to avert the danger of any troops being
sent from France to Palestine. . . strongly opposed this and for the time being won his point" .
Sir William Robertson corroborates: "Up to December 1916" (when Mr. Lloyd George became prime
minister) "operations beyond the Suez Canal had been essentially defensive in principle, the government and
General Staff alike. . . recognizing the paramount importance of the struggle in Europe and the need to give the armies there the
utmost support. This unanimity between ministers and soldiers did not obtain after the premiership changed hands. . . The
fundamental difference of opinion was particularly obtrusive in the case of Palestine. . . The new War Cabinet had been in
existence only a few days when it directed the General Staff to examine the possibility of extending the operations in Palestine. . .
The General Staff put the requirements at three additional divisions and these could only be obtained from the armies on the
Western Front. . . The General Staff said the project would prove a great source of embarrassment and injure our prospects of
success in France. . . These conclusions were disappointing to Ministers, . . . who wished to see Palestine occupied at
once, but they could not be refuted . . . In February the War Cabinet again approached the Chief of the General
Staff, asking what progress was being made with the preparation of an autumn campaign in Palestine".
These passages show how the course of State policy and of military operations in war may be
"deflected" by political pressure behind the scenes. In this case, the issue of the battle between the politicians
and the soldier affects the lives of nations at the present time, the 1950's.
Mr. Lloyd George then reinforced himself by a move which once more shows the long thought that
must have gone into the preparation of this enterprise, and the careful selection of "administrators", to
support it, that must have gone before. He proposed that the War Cabinet "take the Dominions into counsel
in a much larger measure than hitherto in the prosecution of the war". Put in that way, the idea appealed
greatly to the public masses in England. Fighting-men from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South
Africa were campaigning shoulder to shoulder with their own sons. The immediate response of the overseas
countries to the "old country's" danger had touched the native Briton's heart, and he was very happy that
their leaders should join more closely with his own in "prosecuting the war".
However, "the diplomat's word" (and his intention) differed greatly from his deed; Mr. Lloyd George's proposal was merely a "cover" for bringing to London General Smuts from South Africa, who was regarded by the Zionists as their most valuable "friend" outside Europe and America, and General Smuts was brought across to propose the conquest of Palestine!
The voting-population in South Africa is so equally divided between Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans that the "fluctuating 20 percent" was, if anything, more decisive there than in America. The Zionists felt able, and possibly General Smuts believed they were able, to "deliver" an election-winning vote. One of his colleagues, a Mr. B.K. Long (a Smuts Member of Parliament and earlier of the London Times) wrote that "the substantial Jewish vote, which was firmly loyal to Smuts and his party", greatly helped him to such electoral victories. His biography mentions a large legacy from "a rich and powerful Jew" (an example of the falsity of Dr. Weizmann's charge against rich and powerful Jews; apropos, the same Sir Henry Strakosch bequeathed a similar gift to Mr. Winston Churchill) and gifts from some unnamed quarter of a house and car. Thus the party-political considerations which weighed with him were similar to those of Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. House and later others, and material factors are reasonably apparent in his case.
However, the religious (or pseudo-religious) motive is frequently invoked in his biographies (as it was sometimes claimed by Mr. Lloyd George). They state that he preferred the Old Testament to the New, and quote him as saying, "The older I get the more of an Hebraist I become". I met him many years later, when I knew how important a part he played in this earlier story. He was then (1948) much troubled about the declining situation in the world, and the explosive part of Palestine in it. He was of fine appearance, fit and erect when nearly eighty, keen-eyed, and wore a little beard. He was ruthless and on occasion could have been depicted in a cruel light (had the mass-newspapers been arrayed against instead of behind him) and his political astuteness equalled Mr. Lloyd George's. Propaganda portrayed him as the great architect of Anglo/Boer reconciliation; when he died at his lonely Transvaal farm the two races were more at variance than ever, so that true reconciliation remained for later generations to effect. In South Africa he was a divisive force and all knew that the real power behind his party was that of the gold and diamond mining group, not of England; Johannesburg was the base of his political strength. In 1948, when the test came, he was the first to support Zionism against a hard-pressed British Government.
On March 17, 1917 General Smuts reached London, amid unprecedented ovations, and the overthrow of Sir William Robertson at last loomed near. General Smuts's triumphant reception was an early example of the now familiar "build-up" of selected public figures by a push-button press. The method, in another form, is known among the primitive peoples of his native Africa, where "M'Bongo", the Praise maker, stalks before the chief, proclaiming him "Great Elephant, Earth Shaker, Stabber of Heaven" and the like.
General Smuts was presented to the Imperial War Cabinet as "one of the most brilliant generals of the war" (Mr. Lloyd George). General Smuts had in fact conducted a small colonial campaign in South West Africa, and when he was summoned to London was waging an uncompleted one in East Africa against "a small but efficiently bush-trained army of 2,000 German officers and 20,000 native askaris" (his son, Mr. J.C. Smuts). The tribute thus was generous (Mr. Lloyd George's opinion of professional soldiers was low: "There is no profession where experience and training count less in comparison with judgment and flair") .
By that time, the better to seclude themselves from "the generals" (other than General Smuts) Mr. Lloyd George and his small war-waging committee had taken a private house "where they sit twice a day and occupy their whole time with military policy, which is my job; a little body of politicians, quite ignorant of war and all its needs, are trying to run the war themselves" (Sir William Robertson). To this cloistered body, in April 1917, General Smuts by invitation presented his recommendations for winning the war. It was couched in this form: "The Palestine campaign presents very interesting military and even political possibilities . . . There remains for consideration the far more important and complicated question of the Western Front. I have always looked on it as a misfortune. . . . that the British forces have become so entirely absorbed by this front". (When this advice was tendered Russia was in collapse, the transfer of German armies to the Western Front was an obvious and imminent event, and the threat to that front had suddenly increased to the size of a deadly peril).
This recommendation gave Mr. Lloyd George the high military support (from East Africa) which he needed, and he at once had the War Cabinet order the military commander in Egypt to attack towards Jerusalem. General Murray objected that his forces were insufficient and was removed. Thereon the command was offered to General Smuts, whom Mr. Lloyd George considered "likely to prosecute a campaign in that quarter with great determination".
Sir William Robertson then won his greatest victory of the war. He had a talk with General Smuts. His visitor's qualities as a general can never be estimated because he never had an opportunity to test them, in the small campaigns in which he served. His qualities as a politician, however, are beyond all doubt; he was the wariest of men, and strongly averse to exchanging the triumphs of London for the risk of a fiasco in the field which might destroy his political future in South Africa. Therefore, after his talk with Sir William Robertson, he declined Mr. Lloyd George's offer. (As events turned out he would have been spared the fiasco, but that was unforeseeable, and thus one more conqueror missed the chance of entering Jerusalem on a charger. As politicians habitually love such moments, despite the comic aspect which time often gives them, he later regretted this: "To have entered Jerusalem! What a memory!"). At the time he told Mr. Lloyd George, "My strong conviction is that our present military situation does not really justify an offensive campaign for the capture of Jerusalem and the occupation of Palestine".
Mr. Lloyd George was not to be deterred even by this volte-face, or by the collapse of Russia and the new danger in the West. In September 1917 he decided that "the requisite troops for a big campaign in Palestine could be spared from the Western Front during the winter of 1917-1918 and could complete the task in Palestine in time to be back in France for the opening of active work in the spring".
Only God can have preserved Mr. Lloyd George's fellow countrymen from the full penalties of this decision. The war could not be won in Palestine; it still could be lost in France, and the danger was grave. But Mr. Lloyd George, failed even by General Smuts, had found military support at last, for at this moment another figure, crying "mud-months", advanced from the wings of the central stage.
This was one Sir Henry Wilson, who thus portrays himself during a wartime mission to Russia in January 1917: "Gala dinner at the Foreign Office. . . I wore the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour and the Star and Necklace of the Bath, also Russian shoulder-straps and grey astrakhan cap, and altogether I was a fine picture of a man. I created quite a sensation at the Foreign Office dinner and the reception afterwards. I was much taller than the Grand Duke Serge and altogether a 'notable', as I was told. Superb!"
To this man, posturing against the tragic Russian background, Mr. Lloyd George and Zionism owed their golden opportunity, arrived at last, and England very nearly a catastrophe. Sir Henry Wilson was very tall, thin, smooth and smiling; one of those dapper, polished-leather-bound, red-tabbed, beribboned and brass-edged elegants of the Staff who discouraged the muddied, trench weary soldiers in France. He spoke native French (by the chance of a French governess) and on this account "Henri" was beloved by the French generals, who thought him refreshingly free from English stiffness (indeed, he was an Irishman and on Irish questions disagreed with other Irishmen, by two of whom he was shot on his London doorstep in 1922, they being hanged).
Sir Henry earlier had agreed with all other military leaders about the paramountcy of the main front and the madness of wasteful "sideshows" and excelled others in the vigour with which he stated this principle: "The way to end this war is to kill Germans, not Turks. . . The place where we can kill most Germans is here" (France) "and therefore every pound of ammunition we have in the world ought to come here. All history shows that operations in a secondary and ineffectual theatre have no bearing on major operations except to weaken the forces there engaged" (1915).
No staff graduate, or any fighting private, would dispute that. Sir Henry cannot by 1917 have discovered any military reason to abandon this basic principle of war for its opposite. The explanation of his volt-face can only be the obvious one. He had observed the rise of Zion and the nature of Mr. Lloyd George's dispute with his own chief, Sir William Robertson. Sir Henry saw the way to occupy Sir William's shoes. Hence Dr. Weizmann's account of his "discoveries of friends" at that period include an allusion to the "sympathy" of General Wilson, "a great friend of Lloyd George". On August 23, 1917 Sir Henry reported to Mr. Lloyd George "the strong belief that if a really good scheme was thoroughly well worked out, we could clear the Turks out of Palestine and very likely knock them completely out during the mud-months without in any way interfering with Haig's operations next spring and winter" (in France).
In this report Mr. Lloyd George at long last found the support he needed for his order of September 1917, quoted six paragraphs back. He seized on the alluring phrase "mud-months"; it gave him a military argument! General Wilson explained to him that these "mud-months" in France, which by bogging down the armies would preclude a major German offensive while they continued, comprized "five months of mud and snow from the middle of November to the middle of April" (1918). On this counsel Mr. Lloyd George founded his decision to take from France "the requisite troops for a big campaign in Palestine" and to have them back in France in time for any emergency there. As to that, General Wilson, alone among military leaders, advised Mr. Lloyd George that the big German attack probably would never happen (it came in the middle of March).
Sir William Robertson vainly pointed out that the time-table was illusory; the movement of armies entailed major problems of transport and shipping, and by the time the last divisions landed in Palestine the first ones would be re-embarking! In October he again warned that troops taken from France could not be back there in time for summer fighting: "the right military course to pursue is to act on the defensive in Palestine. . . and continue to seek a decision in the West . . . all reserves should be sent to the Western Front".
At that fateful instant chance, ever the arch-conspirator in this story, struck in favour of the Zionists. Cabinet Ministers in London (who apparently had almost forgotten the Western Front) were badgering Sir William Robertson to "give us Jerusalem as a Christmas box" (the phrase appears to reveal again the "extraordinary flippancy" about the war which Dr. Weizmann earlier attributed to Mr. Lloyd George). In Palestine General Allenby, under similar pressure, made a probing advance, found to his surprise that the Turks offered little opposition, and without much difficulty marched into Jerusalem.
The prize was of no military value, in the total sum of the war, but Mr. Lloyd George thenceforward was not to be restrained. Troops were diverted from France without regard to what impended there. On January 6, 1918 Sir Douglas Haig complained of the weakening of his armies in France on the eve of the greatest battle; he was "114,000 infantry down". On January 10,1918 the War Office was forced to issue orders to reduce all divisions from 12 to 9 battalions of infantry.
A free press might at that period have given Sir William Robertson the backing he needed, in public opinion, to avert all this. He was denied that, too, for at that stage the state of affairs foretold by the Protocols of 1905 was being brought about: "We must compel the governments . . . to take action in the direction favoured by our widely-conceived plan. . . by what we shall represent as public opinion, secretly prompted by us through the means of that so-called 'Great Power', the Press, which, with a few exceptions that may be disregarded, is already entirely in our hands". Writers of great repute were ready to inform the public of the imminent danger; they were not allowed to speak.
Colonel Repington, of The Times, was the best-known military writer of that day; his reputation in this field was the highest in the world. He noted in his diary, "This is terrible and will mean the reduction of our infantry in France by a quarter and confusion in all our infantry at the moment of coming crisis. I have never felt so miserable since the war began. . . I can say very little because the editor of The Times often manipulates my criticisms or does not publish them. . .If The Times does not return to its independent line and act as watchdog of the public I shall wash my hands of it".
When the fulfilment of his warnings was at hand, Sir William Robertson was removed. Mr. Lloyd George, resolved to obtain authority for his Palestinian adventure, put his plan to the Supreme War Council of the Allies at Versailles, whose technical advisers, in January 1918, approved it "subject to the Western Front being made secure". Sir William Robertson, at M. Clemenceau's request, restated his warning that it would mortally endanger the Western Front. When the meeting broke up Mr. Lloyd George angrily rebuked him and he was at once supplanted by Sir Henry Wilson.
Before he left his post he used his last moments in it to make a final attempt to avert the coming disaster. He went (also in January) to Paris to ask help from General Pershing, the American commander, in replenishing the depleted front (only four and a half American divisions then had reached France). General Pershing, a soldier true to his duty, made the reply which Sir William expected and would himself have made in General Pershing's place: "He shrewdly [258] observed that it was difficult to reconcile my request for assistance in defence of the Western Front with Mr. George´s desire to act offensively in Palestine. There was, unfortunately, no answer to that argument, except that, so far as I was personally concerned, not a man or gun would be sent to Palestine from anywhere".
After that Sir William Robertson was no longer "concerned". His account differs from the memoirs of Mr. Lloyd George and other politicians in that it shows no rancour; his sole theme is duty. Of his treatment he merely says, "It had frequently been my unpleasant duty during 1917 to object to military enterprises which the Prime Minister wished the army to carry out and this opposition had doubtless determined him to try another Chief of the Imperial General Staff. . . On the point of supersession, therefore, there was nothing to say and I said nothing". Thus an admirable man passes from this story of many lesser men, but his work endured, because, up to the time of his dismissal, he may have saved just enough men and guns for the crumbling line to hold at the last extremity, in March, as a rending hawser may hold by a single thread.
When he was gone two men outside the government and army continued the struggle, and their efforts deserve record because theirs were among the last attempts to preserve the principle of free, independent and vigilant reporting. Colonel Repington was a former cavalry officer, an admirer of pretty women, a lover of good talk, a beau sabreur. His diaries give a lasting picture of the frothy life of the drawing-rooms that went on while armies fought in France and in London intriguers conspired in the political antechambers. He enjoyed it and although he felt its incongruity he realized that gloom alone was no remedy. He was as honest and patriotic as Robertson, and incorruptible; lavish offers (which might have lured him into silence, and possibly were so intended) had no effect on him.
He wrote, "We are feeding over a million men into the sideshow theatres of war and are letting down our strengths in France at a moment when all the Boche forces from Russia may come against us . . . I am unable to get the support from the editor of The Times that I must have to rouse the country and I do not think I will be able to go on with him much longer". (I discovered Colonel Repington's diaries through my work on this book and then realized that his experience was identical with mine, just twenty years later, with the same editor). A month later he wrote, "In a stormy interview I told Mr. Geoffrey Dawson that his subservience to the War Cabinet during this year was largely the cause of the dangerous position of our army . . . I would have nothing more to do with The Times".
This left one man in England who was able and willing to publish the truth. Mr. H.A. Gwynne, of the Morning Post, printed Colonel Repington's article, which exposed the weakening of the French front on the eve of its attack, without submitting it to the censor. He and Colonel Repington then were prosecuted, tried and fined (public opinion was apparently too much on their side for harsher retribution). Sir William Robertson wrote to Colonel Repington, "Like yourself, I did what was best in the general interests of the country and the result has been exactly what I expected . . . But the great thing is to keep on a straight course and then one may be sure that good will eventually come of what may now seem to be evil". *
* In the sequel to all this Sir Edward Carson, who had unwittingly helped Mr. Lloyd George into the premiership, resigned from the government and told the editor of The Times that it was but Mr. Lloyd George's mouthpiece, the Morning Post being the truly independent paper. Mr. Gwynne told Colonel Repington that the government wished to destroy the Morning Post "as it is one of the few independent papers left". Before the Second War came it 'was "destroyed", as already related. After that only one weekly publication survived in England which, in my opinion, for many years sought to uphold the principle of impartial and independent reporting, but in 1953 Truth too, was by a change of ownership brought into line.
Thus the two wartime years of Mr. Lloyd George's leadership in England were momentous in their
effects on the present time, and I believe I have shown how he achieved office and what paramount purpose
he pursued through it. After eighteen months he had overcome all opposition, diverted a mass of men from
France to Palestine, and was ready at last for the great venture.
On March 7, 1918 he gave orders for "a decisive campaign" to conquer all Palestine, and sent General Smuts there to instruct General Allenby accordingly.
On March 21, 1918 the long-awaited German attack in France began, embodying all the men, guns and aircraft released from the Russian front.
The "decisive campaign" in Palestine was immediately suspended and every man who could be squeezed out of Palestine was rushed to France. The total number of men employed in Palestine was 1,192,511 up to October 1918 (General Robertson).
On March 27, 1918 Colonel Repington wrote, "This is the worst defeat in the history of the army". By June 6 the Germans claimed 175,000 prisoners and over 2,000 guns.
At that point the truth was shown of the last words above quoted from Sir William Robertson's letter to Colonel Repington, and they are of continuing hopeful augury to men of goodwill today. By keeping on a straight course he had saved enough for the line to hold, at breaking point, until the Americans began to arrive in strength. Therewith the war was virtually at an end. Clearly, if Russia had been sustained, the Palestinian excursion avoided, and strength concentrated in France it could have been concluded earlier, and probably without the "entanglement" of America. However, that would not have furthered the great plan for "the management of human affairs".
At this point in the tale I write with the feelings of a participant, and they probably influence what I have written of the long earlier story, because the effects, as I have seen them in my generation, appear to me to be bad. I recall the great German attack of March 21, 1918; I saw it from the air and on the ground and was in the fighting for the first month, until I was removed by stretcher. I remember Sir Douglas Haig's order, that every man must fight and die where he stood; it was posted on the walls of my squadron's mess. I have no complaints about the experience, and would not delete it from my life if I could. Now that I have come to see by what ulterior means and motives it was all brought about, I think coming generations might be a little better able to keep Sir William Robertson's "straight course", and so to ensure that good will eventually come of what seems to them to be evil, if they know a little more of what went on then and has continued since. This is my reason for writing the present book.
As a result of the victory in Europe the coveted territory in Palestine was at length acquired. But it is one thing to acquire land and another to build something on it. On this land a Zionist "homeland" was to be erected, then a "state" (and last a "commonwealth"?). None of these things could be done by England alone. No precedent existed for the donation of Arabian territory, by a European conqueror, to an Asiatic beneficiary. For such a transaction other nations had to be co-opted, many nations, and a company promoted, so that it might be given the semblance of honest business. In fact, a "league of nations" was required, and America, above all, had to be "entangled". This other part of the plan was also in preparation; while British armies seized the tract of land desired, the smart lawyers had been looking for ways to amend the rightful title deeds to it, float a company and generally promote the undertaking.
However, "the diplomat's word" (and his intention) differed greatly from his deed; Mr. Lloyd George's proposal was merely a "cover" for bringing to London General Smuts from South Africa, who was regarded by the Zionists as their most valuable "friend" outside Europe and America, and General Smuts was brought across to propose the conquest of Palestine!
The voting-population in South Africa is so equally divided between Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans that the "fluctuating 20 percent" was, if anything, more decisive there than in America. The Zionists felt able, and possibly General Smuts believed they were able, to "deliver" an election-winning vote. One of his colleagues, a Mr. B.K. Long (a Smuts Member of Parliament and earlier of the London Times) wrote that "the substantial Jewish vote, which was firmly loyal to Smuts and his party", greatly helped him to such electoral victories. His biography mentions a large legacy from "a rich and powerful Jew" (an example of the falsity of Dr. Weizmann's charge against rich and powerful Jews; apropos, the same Sir Henry Strakosch bequeathed a similar gift to Mr. Winston Churchill) and gifts from some unnamed quarter of a house and car. Thus the party-political considerations which weighed with him were similar to those of Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. House and later others, and material factors are reasonably apparent in his case.
However, the religious (or pseudo-religious) motive is frequently invoked in his biographies (as it was sometimes claimed by Mr. Lloyd George). They state that he preferred the Old Testament to the New, and quote him as saying, "The older I get the more of an Hebraist I become". I met him many years later, when I knew how important a part he played in this earlier story. He was then (1948) much troubled about the declining situation in the world, and the explosive part of Palestine in it. He was of fine appearance, fit and erect when nearly eighty, keen-eyed, and wore a little beard. He was ruthless and on occasion could have been depicted in a cruel light (had the mass-newspapers been arrayed against instead of behind him) and his political astuteness equalled Mr. Lloyd George's. Propaganda portrayed him as the great architect of Anglo/Boer reconciliation; when he died at his lonely Transvaal farm the two races were more at variance than ever, so that true reconciliation remained for later generations to effect. In South Africa he was a divisive force and all knew that the real power behind his party was that of the gold and diamond mining group, not of England; Johannesburg was the base of his political strength. In 1948, when the test came, he was the first to support Zionism against a hard-pressed British Government.
On March 17, 1917 General Smuts reached London, amid unprecedented ovations, and the overthrow of Sir William Robertson at last loomed near. General Smuts's triumphant reception was an early example of the now familiar "build-up" of selected public figures by a push-button press. The method, in another form, is known among the primitive peoples of his native Africa, where "M'Bongo", the Praise maker, stalks before the chief, proclaiming him "Great Elephant, Earth Shaker, Stabber of Heaven" and the like.
General Smuts was presented to the Imperial War Cabinet as "one of the most brilliant generals of the war" (Mr. Lloyd George). General Smuts had in fact conducted a small colonial campaign in South West Africa, and when he was summoned to London was waging an uncompleted one in East Africa against "a small but efficiently bush-trained army of 2,000 German officers and 20,000 native askaris" (his son, Mr. J.C. Smuts). The tribute thus was generous (Mr. Lloyd George's opinion of professional soldiers was low: "There is no profession where experience and training count less in comparison with judgment and flair") .
By that time, the better to seclude themselves from "the generals" (other than General Smuts) Mr. Lloyd George and his small war-waging committee had taken a private house "where they sit twice a day and occupy their whole time with military policy, which is my job; a little body of politicians, quite ignorant of war and all its needs, are trying to run the war themselves" (Sir William Robertson). To this cloistered body, in April 1917, General Smuts by invitation presented his recommendations for winning the war. It was couched in this form: "The Palestine campaign presents very interesting military and even political possibilities . . . There remains for consideration the far more important and complicated question of the Western Front. I have always looked on it as a misfortune. . . . that the British forces have become so entirely absorbed by this front". (When this advice was tendered Russia was in collapse, the transfer of German armies to the Western Front was an obvious and imminent event, and the threat to that front had suddenly increased to the size of a deadly peril).
This recommendation gave Mr. Lloyd George the high military support (from East Africa) which he needed, and he at once had the War Cabinet order the military commander in Egypt to attack towards Jerusalem. General Murray objected that his forces were insufficient and was removed. Thereon the command was offered to General Smuts, whom Mr. Lloyd George considered "likely to prosecute a campaign in that quarter with great determination".
Sir William Robertson then won his greatest victory of the war. He had a talk with General Smuts. His visitor's qualities as a general can never be estimated because he never had an opportunity to test them, in the small campaigns in which he served. His qualities as a politician, however, are beyond all doubt; he was the wariest of men, and strongly averse to exchanging the triumphs of London for the risk of a fiasco in the field which might destroy his political future in South Africa. Therefore, after his talk with Sir William Robertson, he declined Mr. Lloyd George's offer. (As events turned out he would have been spared the fiasco, but that was unforeseeable, and thus one more conqueror missed the chance of entering Jerusalem on a charger. As politicians habitually love such moments, despite the comic aspect which time often gives them, he later regretted this: "To have entered Jerusalem! What a memory!"). At the time he told Mr. Lloyd George, "My strong conviction is that our present military situation does not really justify an offensive campaign for the capture of Jerusalem and the occupation of Palestine".
Mr. Lloyd George was not to be deterred even by this volte-face, or by the collapse of Russia and the new danger in the West. In September 1917 he decided that "the requisite troops for a big campaign in Palestine could be spared from the Western Front during the winter of 1917-1918 and could complete the task in Palestine in time to be back in France for the opening of active work in the spring".
Only God can have preserved Mr. Lloyd George's fellow countrymen from the full penalties of this decision. The war could not be won in Palestine; it still could be lost in France, and the danger was grave. But Mr. Lloyd George, failed even by General Smuts, had found military support at last, for at this moment another figure, crying "mud-months", advanced from the wings of the central stage.
This was one Sir Henry Wilson, who thus portrays himself during a wartime mission to Russia in January 1917: "Gala dinner at the Foreign Office. . . I wore the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour and the Star and Necklace of the Bath, also Russian shoulder-straps and grey astrakhan cap, and altogether I was a fine picture of a man. I created quite a sensation at the Foreign Office dinner and the reception afterwards. I was much taller than the Grand Duke Serge and altogether a 'notable', as I was told. Superb!"
To this man, posturing against the tragic Russian background, Mr. Lloyd George and Zionism owed their golden opportunity, arrived at last, and England very nearly a catastrophe. Sir Henry Wilson was very tall, thin, smooth and smiling; one of those dapper, polished-leather-bound, red-tabbed, beribboned and brass-edged elegants of the Staff who discouraged the muddied, trench weary soldiers in France. He spoke native French (by the chance of a French governess) and on this account "Henri" was beloved by the French generals, who thought him refreshingly free from English stiffness (indeed, he was an Irishman and on Irish questions disagreed with other Irishmen, by two of whom he was shot on his London doorstep in 1922, they being hanged).
Sir Henry earlier had agreed with all other military leaders about the paramountcy of the main front and the madness of wasteful "sideshows" and excelled others in the vigour with which he stated this principle: "The way to end this war is to kill Germans, not Turks. . . The place where we can kill most Germans is here" (France) "and therefore every pound of ammunition we have in the world ought to come here. All history shows that operations in a secondary and ineffectual theatre have no bearing on major operations except to weaken the forces there engaged" (1915).
No staff graduate, or any fighting private, would dispute that. Sir Henry cannot by 1917 have discovered any military reason to abandon this basic principle of war for its opposite. The explanation of his volt-face can only be the obvious one. He had observed the rise of Zion and the nature of Mr. Lloyd George's dispute with his own chief, Sir William Robertson. Sir Henry saw the way to occupy Sir William's shoes. Hence Dr. Weizmann's account of his "discoveries of friends" at that period include an allusion to the "sympathy" of General Wilson, "a great friend of Lloyd George". On August 23, 1917 Sir Henry reported to Mr. Lloyd George "the strong belief that if a really good scheme was thoroughly well worked out, we could clear the Turks out of Palestine and very likely knock them completely out during the mud-months without in any way interfering with Haig's operations next spring and winter" (in France).
In this report Mr. Lloyd George at long last found the support he needed for his order of September 1917, quoted six paragraphs back. He seized on the alluring phrase "mud-months"; it gave him a military argument! General Wilson explained to him that these "mud-months" in France, which by bogging down the armies would preclude a major German offensive while they continued, comprized "five months of mud and snow from the middle of November to the middle of April" (1918). On this counsel Mr. Lloyd George founded his decision to take from France "the requisite troops for a big campaign in Palestine" and to have them back in France in time for any emergency there. As to that, General Wilson, alone among military leaders, advised Mr. Lloyd George that the big German attack probably would never happen (it came in the middle of March).
Sir William Robertson vainly pointed out that the time-table was illusory; the movement of armies entailed major problems of transport and shipping, and by the time the last divisions landed in Palestine the first ones would be re-embarking! In October he again warned that troops taken from France could not be back there in time for summer fighting: "the right military course to pursue is to act on the defensive in Palestine. . . and continue to seek a decision in the West . . . all reserves should be sent to the Western Front".
At that fateful instant chance, ever the arch-conspirator in this story, struck in favour of the Zionists. Cabinet Ministers in London (who apparently had almost forgotten the Western Front) were badgering Sir William Robertson to "give us Jerusalem as a Christmas box" (the phrase appears to reveal again the "extraordinary flippancy" about the war which Dr. Weizmann earlier attributed to Mr. Lloyd George). In Palestine General Allenby, under similar pressure, made a probing advance, found to his surprise that the Turks offered little opposition, and without much difficulty marched into Jerusalem.
The prize was of no military value, in the total sum of the war, but Mr. Lloyd George thenceforward was not to be restrained. Troops were diverted from France without regard to what impended there. On January 6, 1918 Sir Douglas Haig complained of the weakening of his armies in France on the eve of the greatest battle; he was "114,000 infantry down". On January 10,1918 the War Office was forced to issue orders to reduce all divisions from 12 to 9 battalions of infantry.
A free press might at that period have given Sir William Robertson the backing he needed, in public opinion, to avert all this. He was denied that, too, for at that stage the state of affairs foretold by the Protocols of 1905 was being brought about: "We must compel the governments . . . to take action in the direction favoured by our widely-conceived plan. . . by what we shall represent as public opinion, secretly prompted by us through the means of that so-called 'Great Power', the Press, which, with a few exceptions that may be disregarded, is already entirely in our hands". Writers of great repute were ready to inform the public of the imminent danger; they were not allowed to speak.
Colonel Repington, of The Times, was the best-known military writer of that day; his reputation in this field was the highest in the world. He noted in his diary, "This is terrible and will mean the reduction of our infantry in France by a quarter and confusion in all our infantry at the moment of coming crisis. I have never felt so miserable since the war began. . . I can say very little because the editor of The Times often manipulates my criticisms or does not publish them. . .If The Times does not return to its independent line and act as watchdog of the public I shall wash my hands of it".
When the fulfilment of his warnings was at hand, Sir William Robertson was removed. Mr. Lloyd George, resolved to obtain authority for his Palestinian adventure, put his plan to the Supreme War Council of the Allies at Versailles, whose technical advisers, in January 1918, approved it "subject to the Western Front being made secure". Sir William Robertson, at M. Clemenceau's request, restated his warning that it would mortally endanger the Western Front. When the meeting broke up Mr. Lloyd George angrily rebuked him and he was at once supplanted by Sir Henry Wilson.
Before he left his post he used his last moments in it to make a final attempt to avert the coming disaster. He went (also in January) to Paris to ask help from General Pershing, the American commander, in replenishing the depleted front (only four and a half American divisions then had reached France). General Pershing, a soldier true to his duty, made the reply which Sir William expected and would himself have made in General Pershing's place: "He shrewdly [258] observed that it was difficult to reconcile my request for assistance in defence of the Western Front with Mr. George´s desire to act offensively in Palestine. There was, unfortunately, no answer to that argument, except that, so far as I was personally concerned, not a man or gun would be sent to Palestine from anywhere".
After that Sir William Robertson was no longer "concerned". His account differs from the memoirs of Mr. Lloyd George and other politicians in that it shows no rancour; his sole theme is duty. Of his treatment he merely says, "It had frequently been my unpleasant duty during 1917 to object to military enterprises which the Prime Minister wished the army to carry out and this opposition had doubtless determined him to try another Chief of the Imperial General Staff. . . On the point of supersession, therefore, there was nothing to say and I said nothing". Thus an admirable man passes from this story of many lesser men, but his work endured, because, up to the time of his dismissal, he may have saved just enough men and guns for the crumbling line to hold at the last extremity, in March, as a rending hawser may hold by a single thread.
When he was gone two men outside the government and army continued the struggle, and their efforts deserve record because theirs were among the last attempts to preserve the principle of free, independent and vigilant reporting. Colonel Repington was a former cavalry officer, an admirer of pretty women, a lover of good talk, a beau sabreur. His diaries give a lasting picture of the frothy life of the drawing-rooms that went on while armies fought in France and in London intriguers conspired in the political antechambers. He enjoyed it and although he felt its incongruity he realized that gloom alone was no remedy. He was as honest and patriotic as Robertson, and incorruptible; lavish offers (which might have lured him into silence, and possibly were so intended) had no effect on him.
He wrote, "We are feeding over a million men into the sideshow theatres of war and are letting down our strengths in France at a moment when all the Boche forces from Russia may come against us . . . I am unable to get the support from the editor of The Times that I must have to rouse the country and I do not think I will be able to go on with him much longer". (I discovered Colonel Repington's diaries through my work on this book and then realized that his experience was identical with mine, just twenty years later, with the same editor). A month later he wrote, "In a stormy interview I told Mr. Geoffrey Dawson that his subservience to the War Cabinet during this year was largely the cause of the dangerous position of our army . . . I would have nothing more to do with The Times".
This left one man in England who was able and willing to publish the truth. Mr. H.A. Gwynne, of the Morning Post, printed Colonel Repington's article, which exposed the weakening of the French front on the eve of its attack, without submitting it to the censor. He and Colonel Repington then were prosecuted, tried and fined (public opinion was apparently too much on their side for harsher retribution). Sir William Robertson wrote to Colonel Repington, "Like yourself, I did what was best in the general interests of the country and the result has been exactly what I expected . . . But the great thing is to keep on a straight course and then one may be sure that good will eventually come of what may now seem to be evil". *
* In the sequel to all this Sir Edward Carson, who had unwittingly helped Mr. Lloyd George into the premiership, resigned from the government and told the editor of The Times that it was but Mr. Lloyd George's mouthpiece, the Morning Post being the truly independent paper. Mr. Gwynne told Colonel Repington that the government wished to destroy the Morning Post "as it is one of the few independent papers left". Before the Second War came it 'was "destroyed", as already related. After that only one weekly publication survived in England which, in my opinion, for many years sought to uphold the principle of impartial and independent reporting, but in 1953 Truth too, was by a change of ownership brought into line.
On March 7, 1918 he gave orders for "a decisive campaign" to conquer all Palestine, and sent General Smuts there to instruct General Allenby accordingly.
On March 21, 1918 the long-awaited German attack in France began, embodying all the men, guns and aircraft released from the Russian front.
The "decisive campaign" in Palestine was immediately suspended and every man who could be squeezed out of Palestine was rushed to France. The total number of men employed in Palestine was 1,192,511 up to October 1918 (General Robertson).
On March 27, 1918 Colonel Repington wrote, "This is the worst defeat in the history of the army". By June 6 the Germans claimed 175,000 prisoners and over 2,000 guns.
At that point the truth was shown of the last words above quoted from Sir William Robertson's letter to Colonel Repington, and they are of continuing hopeful augury to men of goodwill today. By keeping on a straight course he had saved enough for the line to hold, at breaking point, until the Americans began to arrive in strength. Therewith the war was virtually at an end. Clearly, if Russia had been sustained, the Palestinian excursion avoided, and strength concentrated in France it could have been concluded earlier, and probably without the "entanglement" of America. However, that would not have furthered the great plan for "the management of human affairs".
At this point in the tale I write with the feelings of a participant, and they probably influence what I have written of the long earlier story, because the effects, as I have seen them in my generation, appear to me to be bad. I recall the great German attack of March 21, 1918; I saw it from the air and on the ground and was in the fighting for the first month, until I was removed by stretcher. I remember Sir Douglas Haig's order, that every man must fight and die where he stood; it was posted on the walls of my squadron's mess. I have no complaints about the experience, and would not delete it from my life if I could. Now that I have come to see by what ulterior means and motives it was all brought about, I think coming generations might be a little better able to keep Sir William Robertson's "straight course", and so to ensure that good will eventually come of what seems to them to be evil, if they know a little more of what went on then and has continued since. This is my reason for writing the present book.
As a result of the victory in Europe the coveted territory in Palestine was at length acquired. But it is one thing to acquire land and another to build something on it. On this land a Zionist "homeland" was to be erected, then a "state" (and last a "commonwealth"?). None of these things could be done by England alone. No precedent existed for the donation of Arabian territory, by a European conqueror, to an Asiatic beneficiary. For such a transaction other nations had to be co-opted, many nations, and a company promoted, so that it might be given the semblance of honest business. In fact, a "league of nations" was required, and America, above all, had to be "entangled". This other part of the plan was also in preparation; while British armies seized the tract of land desired, the smart lawyers had been looking for ways to amend the rightful title deeds to it, float a company and generally promote the undertaking.
Mr. Lloyd George had served his turn and his day was nearly done. The reader may now turn his eyes
across the Atlantic and see what Mr. House, Mr. Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise have been up to. A Mr.
Woodrow Wilson plays a shadowy part in these proceedings.
In England the Lloyd George government and in America the president were at first separately enmeshed. Between 1914 and 1917 these "webs" in London and Washington were joined together by the transoceanic threads which Mr. Howden depicts in the spinning. Thereafter the two governments were caught in the same web and have never since freed themselves from it.
In President Wilson's America the real president was Mr. House ("liaison officer between the Wilson administration and the Zionist movement", Rabbi Wise). Mr. Justice Brandeis, who had decided to "give his life" to Zionism, was the president's "adviser on the Jewish question" (Dr. Weizmann); this is the first appearance in the Presidential household of an authority theretofore unknown in it and now apparently permanent. The chief Zionist organizer was Rabbi Wise, constantly in touch with the two other men.
Mr. House (and Mr. Bernard Baruch), chose the president's cabinet officers, so that one of them had to introduce himself to Mr. Wilson thus: "My name is Lane, Mr. President, I believe I am the Secretary of the Interior". The president lived at the White House in Washington but was frequently seen to visit a small apartment in East 35th Street, New York, where a Mr. House lived. In time this led to pointed questions and one party-man was told, "Mr. House is my second personality; he is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one". Mr. House was often in Washington, where he conducted the president's interviews and correspondence, and, stopping cabinet officers outside the cabinet room, instructed them what to say inside it. Even from New York he directed America by means of private telephone lines linking him with Washington: "it is only necessary to lift off the receiver and I reach the Secretary of State's desk immediately".
The president's assent to acts of State policy was not required. Mr. House "did not expect affirmative commendation . . . if the President did not object, I knew that it was safe to go ahead". Thus Mr. Wilson had to express dissent, to delay or amend any action (and immediately after election he had been made to promise "not to act independently in future").
In 1914 Mr. House, who in 1900 had resolved to extend his power from Texan to national politics, prepared to take over international affairs: "he wanted to exercise his energy in a broader field. . . From the beginning of 1914 he gave more and more thought to what he regarded as the highest form of politics and that for which he was peculiarly suited: international affairs". In fact, Texan upbringing did not so qualify Mr. House. In Texas the words "international affairs' had, in the public mind, a sound akin to "skunk", and there, more than anywhere in America, "the traditions of the 19th century still held the public mind; traditions which laid down, as the primary principle of American policy, a complete abstention from the political affairs of Europe" (Mr. Seymour). Mr. House, who somewhere in Texas had absorbed "the ideas of the revolutionaries of 1848" was to destroy that tradition, but this did not prove him "peculiarly suited" to intervene in "international affairs".
Mr. House was of different type from the languid Mr. Balfour, with his background of Scottish hills and mists, and Mr. Lloyd George, the Artful Dodger of Zionism from Wales, but he acted as if he and they had together graduated from some occult academy of political machination. In 1914 he began to appoint American ambassadors (as he says) and made his first calls on European governments as "a personal friend of the President".
Mr. Seymour, his editor, says: "It would be difficult in all history to find another instance of diplomacy so unconventional and so effective. Colonel House, a private citizen, spreads all the cards on the table and concerts with the Ambassador of a foreign power the despatches to be sent to the American Ambassador and Foreign Minister of that power". Mr. Howden, his confidant, expatiates: "Mr. House had the initiative in what was done. . . The State Department was relegated to the status of an intermediary for his ideas, a depository of public records. Much of the more confidential diplomatic correspondence passed directly through the little apartment in East 35th Street. The Ambassadors of the belligerents called on him when they wanted to influence the Administration or sought assistance in the web of intrigue that was being spun across the Atlantic".
Mr. House: "The life I am leading transcends in interest and excitement any romance. . . Information from every quarter of the globe pours into this little, unobtrusive study". Mr. Seymour again: "Cabinet members in search of candidates, candidates in search of positions made of his study a clearing house. Editors and journalists sought his opinion and despatches to the foreign press were framed almost at his dictation. United States Treasury officials, British diplomats. . . and metropolitan financiers came to his study to discuss their plans" .
A rising man across the Atlantic also was interested in "financiers". Mrs. Beatrice Webb says that Mr. Winston Churchill, somewhat earlier, at a dinner party confided to her that "he looks to haute finance to keep the peace and for that reason objects to a self-contained Empire as he thinks it would destroy this cosmopolitan capitalism, the cosmopolitan financier being the professional peacemaker of the modern world and to his mind the acme of civilization". Later events did not support this notion that leading financiers ("metropolitan" or "cosmopolitan") were "professional peacemakers".
Such was the American picture, behind-the-scenes in 1915 and 1916. The purpose of the ruling group whose web now began to span the Atlantic is shown by the events which followed. Mr. Asquith was overthrown in the pretext that his incompetency imperilled victory; Mr. Lloyd George risked total defeat by diverting armies to Palestine. Mr. Wilson was re-elected in the pretext that he, in the old tradition, would "keep America out of the war"; elected, at once involved America in the war. "The diplomat' s word" and his "deed" were different.
Mr. House privately "concluded that war with Germany is inevitable" on May 30, 1915, and in June 1916 devised the election-winning slogan for Mr. Wilson's second campaign: "He kept us out of the war". Rabbi Stephen Wise, before the election, supported Mr. House's efforts: in letters to the President the rabbi "deplored his advocacy of a preparedness programme" and from public platforms he preached against war. All went as planned: "the House strategy worked perfectly" (Mr. Howden), and Mr. Wilson was triumphantly re-elected.
Mr. Wilson seems at that point to have believed the words put into his mouth. Immediately after the election he set up as a peacemaker and drafted a note to the belligerents in which he used the phrase, "the causes and objects of the war are obscure". This was a culpable act of "independence" on the president's part, and Mr. House was furious. The harassed president amended the phrase to "the objects which the statesmen and the belligerents on both sides have in mind in this war are virtually the same". This made Mr. House even angrier, and Mr. Wilson's efforts to expose the nature of "the web" in which he was caught thereon expired. He remained in ignorance of what his next act was to be for a little, informing Mr. House on January 4, 1917, "There will be no war. This country does not intend to become involved in the war. . . It would be a crime against civilization for us to go in ".
The power-group moved to dispel these illusions as soon as Mr. Wilson's second inauguration was safely past (January 20, 1917). Rabbi Stephen Wise informed the president of a change of mind; he was now "convinced that the time had come for the American people to understand that it might be our destiny to have part in the struggle". Mr. House (who during the "no war" election had noted, "We are on the verge of war") confided to his diary on February 12, 1917, "We are drifting into war as rapidly as I expected" (which gave a new meaning to the word "drift").
Then on March 27, 1917 President Wilson asked Mr. House "whether he should ask Congress to declare war or whether he should say that a state of war exists", and Mr. House "advised the latter", so that the American people were informed, on April 2, 1917, that a state of war existed. * Between November 1916 and April 1917, therefore, "the web of intrigue", spanning the ocean, achieved these decisive aims: the overthrow of Mr. Asquith in favour of Mr. Lloyd
* Lord Sydenham, when he wrote of the "deadly accuracy" of the forecast in the "Protocols" of about 1900, might have had particularly in mind the passage, ". . . We shall invest the president with the right of declaring a state of war. We shall justify this last right on the ground that the president as chief of the whole army of the country must have it at his disposal in case of need". The situation here described became established practice during the present century. In 1950 President Truman sent American troops into Korea. "to check Communist aggression", without consulting Congress. Later this was declared to be a "United Nations" war and they were joined by troops of seventeen other countries under an American commander, General MacArthur. This was the first experiment in a "world government"-type war and its course produced Senator Taft's question of 1952. "Do we really mean our anti-Communist policy?" General MacArthur was dismissed after protesting an order forbidding him to pursue Communist aircraft into their Chinese sanctuary and in 1953, under President Eisenhower, the war was broken off, leaving half of Korea in "the aggressor's" hands. General MacArthur and other American commanders later charged that the order forbidding pursuit was made known to the enemy by "a spy ring responsible for the purloining of my top secret reports to Washington" (Life, Feb. 7, 1956), and the Chinese Communist commander confirmed this (New York Daily News, Feb. 13, 1956). In June 1951 two British Foreign Office officials, Burgess and Maclean, disappeared and in September 1955 the British Government, after refusing information for four years, confirmed the general belief that they were in Moscow and "had spied for the Soviet Union over a long period". General MacArthur then charged that these two men had revealed the non-pursuit order to the Communist "aggressor" (Life, above-quoted).
On April 4, 1956 President Eisenhower was asked by a reporter at his regular news conference whether he would order a United States marine battalion, then recently sent to the Mediterranean, into war "without asking Congress first" (by that time war in the Middle East was an obvious possibility). He answered angrily. "I have announced time and time again I will never be guilty of any kind of action that can be interpreted as war until the Congress, which has the constitutional authority". On January 3, 1957, the first major act of his second term, he sent a draft resolution to Congress designed to invest him with unlimited, standing authority to act militarily in the Middle East "to deter Communist armed aggression". George, the commitment of British armies to the Palestinian diversion, the re-election of a president who would be constrained to support that enterprise, and the embroilment of America.
The statement of existing war made to Congress said the purpose of the war (which Mr. Wilson, a few weeks before, had declared in his draft to be "obscure") was "to set up a new international order". Thus a new purpose was openly, though cryptically revealed. To the public masses the words meant anything or nothing. To the initiates they carried a commitment to support the plan, of which Zionism and Communism both were instruments, for establishing a "world federation" founded on force and the obliteration of nationhood, with the exception of one "nation" to be recreated.
From this moment the power-groups in America and England worked in perfect synchronization, so that the two stories become one story, or one "web". The apparently powerful men in Washington and London co-ordinated their actions at the prompting of the inter-communicating Zionists on both sides of the ocean. Foreknowledge of what was to happen had earlier been displayed by Dr. Weizmann in London, who in March 1915 wrote to his ally, Mr. Scott of the Manchester Guardian, that he "understood" the British Government to be willing to support Zionist aspirations at the peace conference to come (the event also foretold by Max Nordau in 1903). This was exactly what Mr. Asquith would not consider, so that Dr. Weizmann, in March 1915, was already describing Mr. Asquith's supplanters of December 1916 as "the British Government".
This "British Government", said Dr. Weizmann, would leave "the organization of the Jewish commonwealth" in Palestine "entirely to the care of the Jews". However, the Zionists could not possibly, even in a Palestine conquered [265] for them, have set up "a commonwealth" against the native inhabitants. They could only do that behind the protection of a great power and its armies. Therefore Dr. Weizmann (foretelling in 1915 exactly what was to happen in 1919 and the following two decades) considered that a British "protectorate" should be set up in Palestine (to protect the Zionist intruders). This would mean, he said, that "the Jews take over the country; the whole burden of organization falls on them, but for the next ten or fifteen years they work under a temporary British protectorate" .
Dr. Weizmann adds that this was "an anticipation of the mandate system", so that today's student also learns where the notion of "mandates" was born. The idea of ruling conquered territories under a "mandate" bestowed by a self-proclaimed "league of nations" was devised solely with an eye to Palestine. (Events have proved this. All the other "mandates" distributed after the 1914-1918 war, to give the appearance of a procedure generally applicable, have faded away, either by relinquishment of the territory to its inhabitants or by its conversion, in fact, into a possession of the conqueror. The concept of the "mandate" was maintained for just as long as was needed for the Zionists to amass enough arms to take possession of Palestine for themselves).
Thus, after the elevation of Mr. Lloyd George and the second election of Mr. Wilson, the shape of the future, far beyond the war's end, was fully known to Dr. Weizmann at the web's centre, who went into action. In a memorandum to the British Government he demanded that "The Jewish population of Palestine. . . shall be officially recognized by the Suzerain government as the Jewish Nation". The "first full-dress conference leading to the Balfour Declaration" was then held. This committee, met to draft a British governmental document, met in a private Jewish house and consisted of nine Zionist leaders and one representative of the government concerned, Sir Mark Sykes (who attended "in his private capacity"). As a result Mr. Balfour at once arranged to go to America to discuss the matter.
Dr. Weizmann and his associates had to steer a very narrow course between two difficulties at that moment, and might have failed, had not "the web" enabled them to dictate what Mr. Balfour would be told by the men he crossed the ocean to see. The British Government, for all its zeal, took alarm at the prospect of acting as sole protector of the Zionists and wanted America to share the armed occupation of Palestine. The Zionists knew that this would violently upset American opinion, (had it come about America, from bitter experience shared, would have been much harder to win for the deed of 1948) and did not want the question of American co-occupation raised. Dr. Weizmann's misgivings were increased when, in "a long talk" he found Mr. Balfour, before his departure, eager for "an Anglo-American protectorate".
Dr. Weizmann at once wrote to Mr. Justice Brandeis warning him to oppose any such plan, but to assure Mr. Balfour of American support for the proposal of a solely British protectorate, (April 8, 1917), and this letter to Mr. Brandeis "must have reached him about the time of Balfour's arrival". Mr. Brandeis, risen to the United States Supreme Court, had retired from the public leadership of Zionism in America. In the tradition of his office, he should have remained aloof from all political affairs, but in fact, as Mr. Wilson's "adviser on the Jewish question", he informed the president that he was "in favour of a British protectorate and utterly opposed to a condominium" (that is, joint Anglo-American control).
When Mr. Balfour reached America (then in a state of "existing war" for just eighteen days) he apparently never discussed Palestine with the American President at all. Mr. Wilson's part at this stage "was limited to a humble undertaking to Rabbi Wise, "Whenever the time comes and you and Justice Brandeis feel that the time is ripe for me to speak and act, I shall be ready". By that time the rabbi had "briefed" Mr. House: "He is enlisted in our cause. There is no question about it whatever. The thing will go through Washington, I think, without delay" (April 8, 1917, six days after the "existing war" proclamation).
Mr. Balfour saw Mr. Brandeis. Clearly he might as well have stayed at home with Dr. Weizmann, as Mr. Brandeis merely repeated the contents of Dr. Weizmann's letters; Mr. Balfour simply moved from one end of "the web of intrigue" to the other. Mr. Brandeis (as Mrs. Dugdale records) "became' increasingly emphatic about the desire of the Zionists to see a British administration in Palestine". Mr. Balfour, his biographer adds, "pledged his own personal support to Zionism; he had done it before to Dr. Weizmann, but now he was British Foreign Secretary".
A later American comment on the part played by Mr. Brandeis in this affair is here relevant. Professor John O. Beaty of the Southern Methodist University of the United States says that the day when Mr. Brandeis's appointment to the Supreme Court was confirmed was "one of the most significant days in American history, for we had for the first time, since the first decade of the 19th Century, an official of the highest status whose heart's interest was in something besides the United States".
Mr. Brandeis "did more than press the idea of a Jewish Palestine under a British protectorate" (Dr. Weizmann). He and Mr. House issued (over the president's signature) the famous declaration repudiating secret treaties). This declaration was popular with the masses, who heard in it the voice of the Brave New World rebuking the bad old one. The words evoked pictures of cloaked diplomats climbing dark backstairs to secret chancelleries; now that America was in the war these feudal machinations would be stopped and all done above the board.
Alas for a pleasant illusion; the noble rebuke was another submission to Zionism. Turkey had still to be defeated so that the French and British governments (whose fighting men were engaged) wished to win over the Arabs and with them had made the "Sykes-Picot agreement", which foresaw an independent confederation of Arab States and, among them, an international administration for Palestine. Dr. Weizmann had learned of this agreement and saw that there could be no Zionist state if Palestine were under international control; exclusive British "protection" was essential. Pressure was applied and President Wilson's ringing denunciation of "secret treaties" was in fact aimed solely at the Arabs of Palestine and their hopes for the future. America insisted that England hold the baby.
Of this secret achievement Mr. Balfour's biographer happily records that it showed "a Jewish national diplomacy was now in being"; the words may be used as an alternative heading to this chapter, if any so desire. The British Foreign Office at last "recognized, with some slight dismay, that the British Government was virtually committed". America, though in the war, was not at war with Turkey, and yet had been secretly committed (by Mr. Brandeis) to support the transfer of Turkish territory to an outside party. Therefore American participation in the intrigue had to remain publicly unknown for the moment, though Mr. Balfour had been informed of it in imperative tones.
The summer of 1917 passed while the Balfour Declaration was prepared, America thus having become secretly involved in the Zionist adventure. The only remaining opposition, apart from that of generals and a few high Foreign Office or State Department officials, came from the Jews of England and America. It was ineffective because the leading politicians, in both countries, were even more hostile to their Jewish fellow citizens than were the Zionists. (The part played in all this by non-Jews was so great, even if it was the part of puppets, that one is constantly reminded of the need to regard with suspicion the attribution of the Protocols to solely Jewish authorship).
In England in 1915 the Anglo-Jewish Association, through its Conjoint Committee, declared that "the Zionists do not consider civil and political emancipation as a sufficiently important factor for victory over the persecution and oppression of Jews and think that such a victory can only be achieved by establishing a legally secured home for the Jewish people. The Conjoint Committee considers as dangerous and provoking anti-semitism the 'national' postulate of the Zionists, as well as special privileges for Jews in Palestine. The Committee could not discuss the question of a British Protectorate with an international organization which included different, even enemy elements".
In any rational time the British and American governments would have spoken thus, and they would have been supported by Jewish citizens. In 1914, however, Dr. Weizmann had written that such Jews "have to be made to realize that we and not they are the masters of the situation". The Conjoint Committee represented the Jews long established in England, but the British Government accepted the claim of the revolutionaries from Russia to be "the masters" of Jewry.
In 1917, as the irrevocable moment approached, the Conjoint Committee again declared that the Jews were a religious community and nothing more, that they could not claim "a national home", and that Jews in Palestine needed nothing more than "the assurance of religious and civil liberty, reasonable facilities for immigration and the like".
By that time such statements infuriated the embattled Goyim around Dr. Weizmann from Russia. Mr. Wickham Steed of The Times expressed "downright annoyance" after discussing "for a good hour" (with Dr. Weizmann) "the kind of leader which was likely to make the best appeal to the British public", produced "a magnificent presentation of the Zionist case".
In America, Mr. Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise were equally vigilant against the Jews there. The rabbi (from Hungary) asked President Wilson, "What will you do when their protests reach you?" For one moment only he was silent. Then he pointed to a large wastepaper basket at his desk. "Is not that basket capacious enough for all their protests?"
In England Dr. Weizmann was enraged by "outside interference, entirely from Jews". At this point he felt himself to be a member of the Government, or perhaps the member of the Government, and in the power he wielded apparently was that. He did not stop at dismissing the objections of British Jews as "outside interference"; he dictated what the Cabinet should discuss and demanded to sit in Cabinet meetings so that he might attack a Jewish minister! He required that Mr. Lloyd George put the question "on the agenda of the War Cabinet for October 4, 1917" and on October 3 he wrote to the British Foreign Office protesting against objections which he expected to be raised at that meeting "by a prominent Englishman of the Jewish faith".
Mr. Edwin Montagu was a cabinet minister and a Jew. Dr. Weizmann implicitly urged that he be not heard by his colleagues, or that if he were heard, Dr. Weizmann should be called in to reply! On the day of the meeting Dr. Weizmann appeared in the office of the prime minister's secretary, Mr. Philip Kerr (another "friend") and proposed that he remain there in case the Cabinet "decide to ask me some questions before they decide the matter". Mr. Kerr said, "Since the British Government has been a government, no private person has been admitted to one of its sessions", and Dr. Weizmann then went away.
But for that Mr. Lloyd George would have set the precedent, for Dr. Weizmann was scarcely gone when, after hearing Mr. Montagu, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Balfour sent out to ask Dr. Weizmann to come in. Mr. Montagu then succeeded, in the teeth of the Gentiles arrayed against him, in obtaining minor modifications in the draft, and Dr. Weizmann later rebuked Mr. Kerr for this petty compromise: "The Cabinet and even yourself attach undue importance to the opinion held by so-called 'British Jewry'. "Two days later (October 9) Dr. Weizmann cabled triumphantly to Mr. Justice Brandeis that the British Government had formally undertaken to establish a "national home for the [269] Jewish race" in Palestine.
The draft experienced revealing adventures between October 9 and November 2, when it was published. It was sent to America, where it was edited by Mr. Brandeis, Mr. Jacob de Haas and Rabbi Wise before being shown to President Wilson for his "final approval". He simply sent it to Mr. Brandeis (who had already had it from Dr. Weizmann), who passed it to Rabbi Stephen Wise, "to be handed to Colonel House for transmission to the British Cabinet".
In this way one of the most fateful actions ever taken by any British Government was prepared. The draft, incorporated in a letter addressed by Mr. Balfour to Lord Rothschild, became "the Balfour Declaration". The Rothschild family, like many leading Jewish families, was sharply divided about Zionism. The name of a sympathetic Rothschild, as the recipient of the letter, was evidently used to impress Western Jewry in general, and to divert attention from the Eastern Jewish origins of Zionism. The true addressee was Dr. Weizmann. He appears to have become an habitué of the War Cabinet's antechamber and the document was delivered to him, Sir Mark Sykes informing him, "Dr. Weizmann, it's a boy!" (today the shape of the man may be seen).
No rational explanation for the action of leading Western politicians in supporting this alien enterprise has ever been given, and as the undertaking was up to that point secret and conspiratorial no genuine explanation can be given; if an undertaking is good conspiracy is not requisite to it, and secrecy itself indicates motives that cannot be divulged. If any of these men ever gave some public reason, it usually took the form of some vague invocation of the Old Testament. This has a sanctimonious ring, and may be held likely to daunt objectors. Mr. Lloyd George liked to tell Zionist visitors (as Rabbi Wise ironically records), "You shall have Palestine from Dan to Beersheba", and thus to present himself as the instrument of divine will. He once asked Sir Charles and Lady Henry to call anxious Jewish Members of Parliament together at breakfast "so that I may convince them of the rightfulness of my Zionist position". A minyan (Jewish religious quorum of ten) was accordingly assembled in the British Prime Minister's breakfast room, where Mr. Lloyd George read a series of passages which, in his opinion, prescribed the transplantation of Jews in Palestine in 1917: Then he said, "Now, gentlemen, you know What your Bible says; that is the end of the matter".
On other occasions he gave different, and mutually destructive, explanations. He told the Palestine Royal Commission of 1937 that he acted to gain "the support of American Jewry" and that he had "a definite promise" from the Zionist leaders "that if the allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause". .
This was brazen untruth at the very bar of history. America was already in the war when Mr. Balfour went there to agree the Balfour Declaration, and Mr. Balfour's biographer scouts the notion of any such bargain. Rabbi Elmer Berger, a Jewish commentator, says the alleged promise by Zionist leaders inspires in him, ". . . an irrepressible indignation, for myself, my family, my Jewish friends, all of whom are just ordinary Jews . . . it constitutes one of the most obscene libels in all history. Only callousness and cynicism could imply that Jews in the Allied nations were not already giving their utmost to the prosecution of the war" .
Mr. Lloyd George's third explanation ("Acetone converted me to Zionism") is the best known. According to this version Mr. Lloyd George asked Dr. Weizmann how he could be requited for a useful chemical discovery made during the war (when Dr. Weizmann worked for the government, in any spare time left by his work for Zionism). Dr. Weizmann is quoted as replying, "I want nothing for myself, but everything for my people", whereon Mr. Lloyd George decided to give him Palestine! Dr. Weizmann himself derides this story ("History does not deal in Aladdin's lamps. Mr. Lloyd George's advocacy of the Jewish homeland long predated his accession to the premiership"). For that matter, it is British practice to make cash awards for such services and Dr. Weizmann, far from wanting nothing for himself, received ten thousand pounds. (If chemical research were customarily rewarded in land he might have claimed a minor duchy from Germany in respect of a patent earlier sold to the German Dye Trust, and presumably found useful in war as in peace; he was naturally content with the income he received from it for several years).
The conclusion cannot be escaped: if any honest explanation of his actions in this matter could be found Mr. Lloyd George would have given it. From this period in 1916-1917 the decay of parliamentary and representative government can be traced, both in England and America. If secret men could dictate major acts of American state policy and major operations of British armies, then clearly "election" and "responsible office" were terms devoid of meaning. Party distinctions began to fade in both countries, once this hidden, supreme authority was accepted by leading Western politicians, and the American and British electors began to be deprived of all true choice. Today this condition is general, and now is public. Leaders of all parties, before elections, make obeisance to Zionism, and the voter's selection of president, prime minister or party makes no true difference.
In November 1917 the American Republic thus became equally involved with Great Britain in Zionism, which has proved to be a destructive force. However, it was only one agency of "the destructive principle". The reader will recall that in Dr. Weizmann's Russian youth the mass of Jews there, under their Talmudic directors, were united in the revolutionary aim, and only divided between revolutionary-Zionism and revolutionary-Communism.
In the very week of the Balfour Declaration the other group of Jews in Russia achieved their aim, the destruction of the Russian nation-state. The Western politicians thus bred a bicephalous monster, one head being the power of Zionism in the Western capitals, and the other the power of Communism advancing from captive Russia. Submission to Zionism weakened the power of the West to preserve itself against the world-revolution, for Zionism worked to keep Western governments submissive and to deflect their policies from national interests; indeed, at that instant the cry was first raised that opposition to the world-revolution, too, was "anti-semitism". Governments hampered by secret capitulations in any one direction cannot act firmly in any other, and the timidity of London and Washington in their dealings with the world-revolution, during the four decades to follow, evidently derived from their initial submission to "the web of intrigue" spun across the Atlantic between 1914 and 1917.
After 1917, therefore, the question which the remainder of the 20th Century had to answer was whether the West could yet find in itself the strength to break free, or prise its political leaders loose, from this double thrall. In considering the remainder of this account the reader should bear in mind what British and American politicians were induced to do during the First World War.
next
THE WORLD REVOLUTION AGAIN
Chapter 31
THE WEB OF INTRIGUE
Such words as "conspiracy" and "intrigue", often used in this narrative, are not original with me; they
come from authoritative sources. Mr. Arthur D. Howden, who wrote his biography in consultation with the
man depicted, supplies the chapter title above; he describes the process of which Mr. House was (in America)
the centre during the 1914-1918 war in the words, "a web of intrigue was spun across the Atlantic". In England the Lloyd George government and in America the president were at first separately enmeshed. Between 1914 and 1917 these "webs" in London and Washington were joined together by the transoceanic threads which Mr. Howden depicts in the spinning. Thereafter the two governments were caught in the same web and have never since freed themselves from it.
In President Wilson's America the real president was Mr. House ("liaison officer between the Wilson administration and the Zionist movement", Rabbi Wise). Mr. Justice Brandeis, who had decided to "give his life" to Zionism, was the president's "adviser on the Jewish question" (Dr. Weizmann); this is the first appearance in the Presidential household of an authority theretofore unknown in it and now apparently permanent. The chief Zionist organizer was Rabbi Wise, constantly in touch with the two other men.
Mr. House (and Mr. Bernard Baruch), chose the president's cabinet officers, so that one of them had to introduce himself to Mr. Wilson thus: "My name is Lane, Mr. President, I believe I am the Secretary of the Interior". The president lived at the White House in Washington but was frequently seen to visit a small apartment in East 35th Street, New York, where a Mr. House lived. In time this led to pointed questions and one party-man was told, "Mr. House is my second personality; he is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one". Mr. House was often in Washington, where he conducted the president's interviews and correspondence, and, stopping cabinet officers outside the cabinet room, instructed them what to say inside it. Even from New York he directed America by means of private telephone lines linking him with Washington: "it is only necessary to lift off the receiver and I reach the Secretary of State's desk immediately".
The president's assent to acts of State policy was not required. Mr. House "did not expect affirmative commendation . . . if the President did not object, I knew that it was safe to go ahead". Thus Mr. Wilson had to express dissent, to delay or amend any action (and immediately after election he had been made to promise "not to act independently in future").
In 1914 Mr. House, who in 1900 had resolved to extend his power from Texan to national politics, prepared to take over international affairs: "he wanted to exercise his energy in a broader field. . . From the beginning of 1914 he gave more and more thought to what he regarded as the highest form of politics and that for which he was peculiarly suited: international affairs". In fact, Texan upbringing did not so qualify Mr. House. In Texas the words "international affairs' had, in the public mind, a sound akin to "skunk", and there, more than anywhere in America, "the traditions of the 19th century still held the public mind; traditions which laid down, as the primary principle of American policy, a complete abstention from the political affairs of Europe" (Mr. Seymour). Mr. House, who somewhere in Texas had absorbed "the ideas of the revolutionaries of 1848" was to destroy that tradition, but this did not prove him "peculiarly suited" to intervene in "international affairs".
Mr. House was of different type from the languid Mr. Balfour, with his background of Scottish hills and mists, and Mr. Lloyd George, the Artful Dodger of Zionism from Wales, but he acted as if he and they had together graduated from some occult academy of political machination. In 1914 he began to appoint American ambassadors (as he says) and made his first calls on European governments as "a personal friend of the President".
Mr. Seymour, his editor, says: "It would be difficult in all history to find another instance of diplomacy so unconventional and so effective. Colonel House, a private citizen, spreads all the cards on the table and concerts with the Ambassador of a foreign power the despatches to be sent to the American Ambassador and Foreign Minister of that power". Mr. Howden, his confidant, expatiates: "Mr. House had the initiative in what was done. . . The State Department was relegated to the status of an intermediary for his ideas, a depository of public records. Much of the more confidential diplomatic correspondence passed directly through the little apartment in East 35th Street. The Ambassadors of the belligerents called on him when they wanted to influence the Administration or sought assistance in the web of intrigue that was being spun across the Atlantic".
Mr. House: "The life I am leading transcends in interest and excitement any romance. . . Information from every quarter of the globe pours into this little, unobtrusive study". Mr. Seymour again: "Cabinet members in search of candidates, candidates in search of positions made of his study a clearing house. Editors and journalists sought his opinion and despatches to the foreign press were framed almost at his dictation. United States Treasury officials, British diplomats. . . and metropolitan financiers came to his study to discuss their plans" .
A rising man across the Atlantic also was interested in "financiers". Mrs. Beatrice Webb says that Mr. Winston Churchill, somewhat earlier, at a dinner party confided to her that "he looks to haute finance to keep the peace and for that reason objects to a self-contained Empire as he thinks it would destroy this cosmopolitan capitalism, the cosmopolitan financier being the professional peacemaker of the modern world and to his mind the acme of civilization". Later events did not support this notion that leading financiers ("metropolitan" or "cosmopolitan") were "professional peacemakers".
Such was the American picture, behind-the-scenes in 1915 and 1916. The purpose of the ruling group whose web now began to span the Atlantic is shown by the events which followed. Mr. Asquith was overthrown in the pretext that his incompetency imperilled victory; Mr. Lloyd George risked total defeat by diverting armies to Palestine. Mr. Wilson was re-elected in the pretext that he, in the old tradition, would "keep America out of the war"; elected, at once involved America in the war. "The diplomat' s word" and his "deed" were different.
Mr. House privately "concluded that war with Germany is inevitable" on May 30, 1915, and in June 1916 devised the election-winning slogan for Mr. Wilson's second campaign: "He kept us out of the war". Rabbi Stephen Wise, before the election, supported Mr. House's efforts: in letters to the President the rabbi "deplored his advocacy of a preparedness programme" and from public platforms he preached against war. All went as planned: "the House strategy worked perfectly" (Mr. Howden), and Mr. Wilson was triumphantly re-elected.
Mr. Wilson seems at that point to have believed the words put into his mouth. Immediately after the election he set up as a peacemaker and drafted a note to the belligerents in which he used the phrase, "the causes and objects of the war are obscure". This was a culpable act of "independence" on the president's part, and Mr. House was furious. The harassed president amended the phrase to "the objects which the statesmen and the belligerents on both sides have in mind in this war are virtually the same". This made Mr. House even angrier, and Mr. Wilson's efforts to expose the nature of "the web" in which he was caught thereon expired. He remained in ignorance of what his next act was to be for a little, informing Mr. House on January 4, 1917, "There will be no war. This country does not intend to become involved in the war. . . It would be a crime against civilization for us to go in ".
The power-group moved to dispel these illusions as soon as Mr. Wilson's second inauguration was safely past (January 20, 1917). Rabbi Stephen Wise informed the president of a change of mind; he was now "convinced that the time had come for the American people to understand that it might be our destiny to have part in the struggle". Mr. House (who during the "no war" election had noted, "We are on the verge of war") confided to his diary on February 12, 1917, "We are drifting into war as rapidly as I expected" (which gave a new meaning to the word "drift").
Then on March 27, 1917 President Wilson asked Mr. House "whether he should ask Congress to declare war or whether he should say that a state of war exists", and Mr. House "advised the latter", so that the American people were informed, on April 2, 1917, that a state of war existed. * Between November 1916 and April 1917, therefore, "the web of intrigue", spanning the ocean, achieved these decisive aims: the overthrow of Mr. Asquith in favour of Mr. Lloyd
* Lord Sydenham, when he wrote of the "deadly accuracy" of the forecast in the "Protocols" of about 1900, might have had particularly in mind the passage, ". . . We shall invest the president with the right of declaring a state of war. We shall justify this last right on the ground that the president as chief of the whole army of the country must have it at his disposal in case of need". The situation here described became established practice during the present century. In 1950 President Truman sent American troops into Korea. "to check Communist aggression", without consulting Congress. Later this was declared to be a "United Nations" war and they were joined by troops of seventeen other countries under an American commander, General MacArthur. This was the first experiment in a "world government"-type war and its course produced Senator Taft's question of 1952. "Do we really mean our anti-Communist policy?" General MacArthur was dismissed after protesting an order forbidding him to pursue Communist aircraft into their Chinese sanctuary and in 1953, under President Eisenhower, the war was broken off, leaving half of Korea in "the aggressor's" hands. General MacArthur and other American commanders later charged that the order forbidding pursuit was made known to the enemy by "a spy ring responsible for the purloining of my top secret reports to Washington" (Life, Feb. 7, 1956), and the Chinese Communist commander confirmed this (New York Daily News, Feb. 13, 1956). In June 1951 two British Foreign Office officials, Burgess and Maclean, disappeared and in September 1955 the British Government, after refusing information for four years, confirmed the general belief that they were in Moscow and "had spied for the Soviet Union over a long period". General MacArthur then charged that these two men had revealed the non-pursuit order to the Communist "aggressor" (Life, above-quoted).
On April 4, 1956 President Eisenhower was asked by a reporter at his regular news conference whether he would order a United States marine battalion, then recently sent to the Mediterranean, into war "without asking Congress first" (by that time war in the Middle East was an obvious possibility). He answered angrily. "I have announced time and time again I will never be guilty of any kind of action that can be interpreted as war until the Congress, which has the constitutional authority". On January 3, 1957, the first major act of his second term, he sent a draft resolution to Congress designed to invest him with unlimited, standing authority to act militarily in the Middle East "to deter Communist armed aggression". George, the commitment of British armies to the Palestinian diversion, the re-election of a president who would be constrained to support that enterprise, and the embroilment of America.
The statement of existing war made to Congress said the purpose of the war (which Mr. Wilson, a few weeks before, had declared in his draft to be "obscure") was "to set up a new international order". Thus a new purpose was openly, though cryptically revealed. To the public masses the words meant anything or nothing. To the initiates they carried a commitment to support the plan, of which Zionism and Communism both were instruments, for establishing a "world federation" founded on force and the obliteration of nationhood, with the exception of one "nation" to be recreated.
From this moment the power-groups in America and England worked in perfect synchronization, so that the two stories become one story, or one "web". The apparently powerful men in Washington and London co-ordinated their actions at the prompting of the inter-communicating Zionists on both sides of the ocean. Foreknowledge of what was to happen had earlier been displayed by Dr. Weizmann in London, who in March 1915 wrote to his ally, Mr. Scott of the Manchester Guardian, that he "understood" the British Government to be willing to support Zionist aspirations at the peace conference to come (the event also foretold by Max Nordau in 1903). This was exactly what Mr. Asquith would not consider, so that Dr. Weizmann, in March 1915, was already describing Mr. Asquith's supplanters of December 1916 as "the British Government".
This "British Government", said Dr. Weizmann, would leave "the organization of the Jewish commonwealth" in Palestine "entirely to the care of the Jews". However, the Zionists could not possibly, even in a Palestine conquered [265] for them, have set up "a commonwealth" against the native inhabitants. They could only do that behind the protection of a great power and its armies. Therefore Dr. Weizmann (foretelling in 1915 exactly what was to happen in 1919 and the following two decades) considered that a British "protectorate" should be set up in Palestine (to protect the Zionist intruders). This would mean, he said, that "the Jews take over the country; the whole burden of organization falls on them, but for the next ten or fifteen years they work under a temporary British protectorate" .
Dr. Weizmann adds that this was "an anticipation of the mandate system", so that today's student also learns where the notion of "mandates" was born. The idea of ruling conquered territories under a "mandate" bestowed by a self-proclaimed "league of nations" was devised solely with an eye to Palestine. (Events have proved this. All the other "mandates" distributed after the 1914-1918 war, to give the appearance of a procedure generally applicable, have faded away, either by relinquishment of the territory to its inhabitants or by its conversion, in fact, into a possession of the conqueror. The concept of the "mandate" was maintained for just as long as was needed for the Zionists to amass enough arms to take possession of Palestine for themselves).
Thus, after the elevation of Mr. Lloyd George and the second election of Mr. Wilson, the shape of the future, far beyond the war's end, was fully known to Dr. Weizmann at the web's centre, who went into action. In a memorandum to the British Government he demanded that "The Jewish population of Palestine. . . shall be officially recognized by the Suzerain government as the Jewish Nation". The "first full-dress conference leading to the Balfour Declaration" was then held. This committee, met to draft a British governmental document, met in a private Jewish house and consisted of nine Zionist leaders and one representative of the government concerned, Sir Mark Sykes (who attended "in his private capacity"). As a result Mr. Balfour at once arranged to go to America to discuss the matter.
Dr. Weizmann and his associates had to steer a very narrow course between two difficulties at that moment, and might have failed, had not "the web" enabled them to dictate what Mr. Balfour would be told by the men he crossed the ocean to see. The British Government, for all its zeal, took alarm at the prospect of acting as sole protector of the Zionists and wanted America to share the armed occupation of Palestine. The Zionists knew that this would violently upset American opinion, (had it come about America, from bitter experience shared, would have been much harder to win for the deed of 1948) and did not want the question of American co-occupation raised. Dr. Weizmann's misgivings were increased when, in "a long talk" he found Mr. Balfour, before his departure, eager for "an Anglo-American protectorate".
Dr. Weizmann at once wrote to Mr. Justice Brandeis warning him to oppose any such plan, but to assure Mr. Balfour of American support for the proposal of a solely British protectorate, (April 8, 1917), and this letter to Mr. Brandeis "must have reached him about the time of Balfour's arrival". Mr. Brandeis, risen to the United States Supreme Court, had retired from the public leadership of Zionism in America. In the tradition of his office, he should have remained aloof from all political affairs, but in fact, as Mr. Wilson's "adviser on the Jewish question", he informed the president that he was "in favour of a British protectorate and utterly opposed to a condominium" (that is, joint Anglo-American control).
When Mr. Balfour reached America (then in a state of "existing war" for just eighteen days) he apparently never discussed Palestine with the American President at all. Mr. Wilson's part at this stage "was limited to a humble undertaking to Rabbi Wise, "Whenever the time comes and you and Justice Brandeis feel that the time is ripe for me to speak and act, I shall be ready". By that time the rabbi had "briefed" Mr. House: "He is enlisted in our cause. There is no question about it whatever. The thing will go through Washington, I think, without delay" (April 8, 1917, six days after the "existing war" proclamation).
Mr. Balfour saw Mr. Brandeis. Clearly he might as well have stayed at home with Dr. Weizmann, as Mr. Brandeis merely repeated the contents of Dr. Weizmann's letters; Mr. Balfour simply moved from one end of "the web of intrigue" to the other. Mr. Brandeis (as Mrs. Dugdale records) "became' increasingly emphatic about the desire of the Zionists to see a British administration in Palestine". Mr. Balfour, his biographer adds, "pledged his own personal support to Zionism; he had done it before to Dr. Weizmann, but now he was British Foreign Secretary".
A later American comment on the part played by Mr. Brandeis in this affair is here relevant. Professor John O. Beaty of the Southern Methodist University of the United States says that the day when Mr. Brandeis's appointment to the Supreme Court was confirmed was "one of the most significant days in American history, for we had for the first time, since the first decade of the 19th Century, an official of the highest status whose heart's interest was in something besides the United States".
Mr. Brandeis "did more than press the idea of a Jewish Palestine under a British protectorate" (Dr. Weizmann). He and Mr. House issued (over the president's signature) the famous declaration repudiating secret treaties). This declaration was popular with the masses, who heard in it the voice of the Brave New World rebuking the bad old one. The words evoked pictures of cloaked diplomats climbing dark backstairs to secret chancelleries; now that America was in the war these feudal machinations would be stopped and all done above the board.
Alas for a pleasant illusion; the noble rebuke was another submission to Zionism. Turkey had still to be defeated so that the French and British governments (whose fighting men were engaged) wished to win over the Arabs and with them had made the "Sykes-Picot agreement", which foresaw an independent confederation of Arab States and, among them, an international administration for Palestine. Dr. Weizmann had learned of this agreement and saw that there could be no Zionist state if Palestine were under international control; exclusive British "protection" was essential. Pressure was applied and President Wilson's ringing denunciation of "secret treaties" was in fact aimed solely at the Arabs of Palestine and their hopes for the future. America insisted that England hold the baby.
Of this secret achievement Mr. Balfour's biographer happily records that it showed "a Jewish national diplomacy was now in being"; the words may be used as an alternative heading to this chapter, if any so desire. The British Foreign Office at last "recognized, with some slight dismay, that the British Government was virtually committed". America, though in the war, was not at war with Turkey, and yet had been secretly committed (by Mr. Brandeis) to support the transfer of Turkish territory to an outside party. Therefore American participation in the intrigue had to remain publicly unknown for the moment, though Mr. Balfour had been informed of it in imperative tones.
The summer of 1917 passed while the Balfour Declaration was prepared, America thus having become secretly involved in the Zionist adventure. The only remaining opposition, apart from that of generals and a few high Foreign Office or State Department officials, came from the Jews of England and America. It was ineffective because the leading politicians, in both countries, were even more hostile to their Jewish fellow citizens than were the Zionists. (The part played in all this by non-Jews was so great, even if it was the part of puppets, that one is constantly reminded of the need to regard with suspicion the attribution of the Protocols to solely Jewish authorship).
In England in 1915 the Anglo-Jewish Association, through its Conjoint Committee, declared that "the Zionists do not consider civil and political emancipation as a sufficiently important factor for victory over the persecution and oppression of Jews and think that such a victory can only be achieved by establishing a legally secured home for the Jewish people. The Conjoint Committee considers as dangerous and provoking anti-semitism the 'national' postulate of the Zionists, as well as special privileges for Jews in Palestine. The Committee could not discuss the question of a British Protectorate with an international organization which included different, even enemy elements".
In any rational time the British and American governments would have spoken thus, and they would have been supported by Jewish citizens. In 1914, however, Dr. Weizmann had written that such Jews "have to be made to realize that we and not they are the masters of the situation". The Conjoint Committee represented the Jews long established in England, but the British Government accepted the claim of the revolutionaries from Russia to be "the masters" of Jewry.
In 1917, as the irrevocable moment approached, the Conjoint Committee again declared that the Jews were a religious community and nothing more, that they could not claim "a national home", and that Jews in Palestine needed nothing more than "the assurance of religious and civil liberty, reasonable facilities for immigration and the like".
By that time such statements infuriated the embattled Goyim around Dr. Weizmann from Russia. Mr. Wickham Steed of The Times expressed "downright annoyance" after discussing "for a good hour" (with Dr. Weizmann) "the kind of leader which was likely to make the best appeal to the British public", produced "a magnificent presentation of the Zionist case".
In America, Mr. Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise were equally vigilant against the Jews there. The rabbi (from Hungary) asked President Wilson, "What will you do when their protests reach you?" For one moment only he was silent. Then he pointed to a large wastepaper basket at his desk. "Is not that basket capacious enough for all their protests?"
In England Dr. Weizmann was enraged by "outside interference, entirely from Jews". At this point he felt himself to be a member of the Government, or perhaps the member of the Government, and in the power he wielded apparently was that. He did not stop at dismissing the objections of British Jews as "outside interference"; he dictated what the Cabinet should discuss and demanded to sit in Cabinet meetings so that he might attack a Jewish minister! He required that Mr. Lloyd George put the question "on the agenda of the War Cabinet for October 4, 1917" and on October 3 he wrote to the British Foreign Office protesting against objections which he expected to be raised at that meeting "by a prominent Englishman of the Jewish faith".
Mr. Edwin Montagu was a cabinet minister and a Jew. Dr. Weizmann implicitly urged that he be not heard by his colleagues, or that if he were heard, Dr. Weizmann should be called in to reply! On the day of the meeting Dr. Weizmann appeared in the office of the prime minister's secretary, Mr. Philip Kerr (another "friend") and proposed that he remain there in case the Cabinet "decide to ask me some questions before they decide the matter". Mr. Kerr said, "Since the British Government has been a government, no private person has been admitted to one of its sessions", and Dr. Weizmann then went away.
But for that Mr. Lloyd George would have set the precedent, for Dr. Weizmann was scarcely gone when, after hearing Mr. Montagu, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Balfour sent out to ask Dr. Weizmann to come in. Mr. Montagu then succeeded, in the teeth of the Gentiles arrayed against him, in obtaining minor modifications in the draft, and Dr. Weizmann later rebuked Mr. Kerr for this petty compromise: "The Cabinet and even yourself attach undue importance to the opinion held by so-called 'British Jewry'. "Two days later (October 9) Dr. Weizmann cabled triumphantly to Mr. Justice Brandeis that the British Government had formally undertaken to establish a "national home for the [269] Jewish race" in Palestine.
The draft experienced revealing adventures between October 9 and November 2, when it was published. It was sent to America, where it was edited by Mr. Brandeis, Mr. Jacob de Haas and Rabbi Wise before being shown to President Wilson for his "final approval". He simply sent it to Mr. Brandeis (who had already had it from Dr. Weizmann), who passed it to Rabbi Stephen Wise, "to be handed to Colonel House for transmission to the British Cabinet".
In this way one of the most fateful actions ever taken by any British Government was prepared. The draft, incorporated in a letter addressed by Mr. Balfour to Lord Rothschild, became "the Balfour Declaration". The Rothschild family, like many leading Jewish families, was sharply divided about Zionism. The name of a sympathetic Rothschild, as the recipient of the letter, was evidently used to impress Western Jewry in general, and to divert attention from the Eastern Jewish origins of Zionism. The true addressee was Dr. Weizmann. He appears to have become an habitué of the War Cabinet's antechamber and the document was delivered to him, Sir Mark Sykes informing him, "Dr. Weizmann, it's a boy!" (today the shape of the man may be seen).
No rational explanation for the action of leading Western politicians in supporting this alien enterprise has ever been given, and as the undertaking was up to that point secret and conspiratorial no genuine explanation can be given; if an undertaking is good conspiracy is not requisite to it, and secrecy itself indicates motives that cannot be divulged. If any of these men ever gave some public reason, it usually took the form of some vague invocation of the Old Testament. This has a sanctimonious ring, and may be held likely to daunt objectors. Mr. Lloyd George liked to tell Zionist visitors (as Rabbi Wise ironically records), "You shall have Palestine from Dan to Beersheba", and thus to present himself as the instrument of divine will. He once asked Sir Charles and Lady Henry to call anxious Jewish Members of Parliament together at breakfast "so that I may convince them of the rightfulness of my Zionist position". A minyan (Jewish religious quorum of ten) was accordingly assembled in the British Prime Minister's breakfast room, where Mr. Lloyd George read a series of passages which, in his opinion, prescribed the transplantation of Jews in Palestine in 1917: Then he said, "Now, gentlemen, you know What your Bible says; that is the end of the matter".
On other occasions he gave different, and mutually destructive, explanations. He told the Palestine Royal Commission of 1937 that he acted to gain "the support of American Jewry" and that he had "a definite promise" from the Zionist leaders "that if the allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause". .
This was brazen untruth at the very bar of history. America was already in the war when Mr. Balfour went there to agree the Balfour Declaration, and Mr. Balfour's biographer scouts the notion of any such bargain. Rabbi Elmer Berger, a Jewish commentator, says the alleged promise by Zionist leaders inspires in him, ". . . an irrepressible indignation, for myself, my family, my Jewish friends, all of whom are just ordinary Jews . . . it constitutes one of the most obscene libels in all history. Only callousness and cynicism could imply that Jews in the Allied nations were not already giving their utmost to the prosecution of the war" .
Mr. Lloyd George's third explanation ("Acetone converted me to Zionism") is the best known. According to this version Mr. Lloyd George asked Dr. Weizmann how he could be requited for a useful chemical discovery made during the war (when Dr. Weizmann worked for the government, in any spare time left by his work for Zionism). Dr. Weizmann is quoted as replying, "I want nothing for myself, but everything for my people", whereon Mr. Lloyd George decided to give him Palestine! Dr. Weizmann himself derides this story ("History does not deal in Aladdin's lamps. Mr. Lloyd George's advocacy of the Jewish homeland long predated his accession to the premiership"). For that matter, it is British practice to make cash awards for such services and Dr. Weizmann, far from wanting nothing for himself, received ten thousand pounds. (If chemical research were customarily rewarded in land he might have claimed a minor duchy from Germany in respect of a patent earlier sold to the German Dye Trust, and presumably found useful in war as in peace; he was naturally content with the income he received from it for several years).
The conclusion cannot be escaped: if any honest explanation of his actions in this matter could be found Mr. Lloyd George would have given it. From this period in 1916-1917 the decay of parliamentary and representative government can be traced, both in England and America. If secret men could dictate major acts of American state policy and major operations of British armies, then clearly "election" and "responsible office" were terms devoid of meaning. Party distinctions began to fade in both countries, once this hidden, supreme authority was accepted by leading Western politicians, and the American and British electors began to be deprived of all true choice. Today this condition is general, and now is public. Leaders of all parties, before elections, make obeisance to Zionism, and the voter's selection of president, prime minister or party makes no true difference.
In November 1917 the American Republic thus became equally involved with Great Britain in Zionism, which has proved to be a destructive force. However, it was only one agency of "the destructive principle". The reader will recall that in Dr. Weizmann's Russian youth the mass of Jews there, under their Talmudic directors, were united in the revolutionary aim, and only divided between revolutionary-Zionism and revolutionary-Communism.
In the very week of the Balfour Declaration the other group of Jews in Russia achieved their aim, the destruction of the Russian nation-state. The Western politicians thus bred a bicephalous monster, one head being the power of Zionism in the Western capitals, and the other the power of Communism advancing from captive Russia. Submission to Zionism weakened the power of the West to preserve itself against the world-revolution, for Zionism worked to keep Western governments submissive and to deflect their policies from national interests; indeed, at that instant the cry was first raised that opposition to the world-revolution, too, was "anti-semitism". Governments hampered by secret capitulations in any one direction cannot act firmly in any other, and the timidity of London and Washington in their dealings with the world-revolution, during the four decades to follow, evidently derived from their initial submission to "the web of intrigue" spun across the Atlantic between 1914 and 1917.
After 1917, therefore, the question which the remainder of the 20th Century had to answer was whether the West could yet find in itself the strength to break free, or prise its political leaders loose, from this double thrall. In considering the remainder of this account the reader should bear in mind what British and American politicians were induced to do during the First World War.
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THE WORLD REVOLUTION AGAIN
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