Just as I felt obligated to comment back in May 2016 on “The Bullshistory of ‘Sykes-Picot’” on the occasion of its centenary, this past June I felt obligated to comment on the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War. In the course of doing so I reflected on the psychological power of anniversaries and the potential dangers they posed to understanding, concluding thus:
Anniversaries are shiny. They attract a lot of attention, much of it self-interested and sentimental enough to lure some people into excessive simplifications if not outright simplemindedness. If someone will bait the hook, someone else will swallow it. We witnessed exactly such a spectacle not long ago at the 100th anniversary of Sykes-Picot, and we’ll see it again a few months hence with the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
Well, here we are, in November, on the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, and on the eve too of the 70th anniversary of the UNSCOP decision, rendered at Flushing Meadows, New York, on the partition of Palestine. And just like clockwork, the bullshistory pours forth, some of it new but most of it deeply marinated over the years in basins of self-serving intoxicants. So pervasive are the resultant funhouse mirror images of these historical events that they form echo chambers that ratify their distortions by dint of habitual repetition. These rounded-off caricatures have thus become like nails without heads: not all that hard to hammer in, but almost impossible to remove.
Fortunately, this time around there is no need for me to summarize at any length the real history of the Balfour Declaration and the UNSCOP vote, since it has already been lately done by a steady and sober hand—that of Martin Kramer. He handled the former in a June 5 Mosaic essay entitled “The Forgotten Truth About the Balfour Declaration.” The latter is treated in another Mosaic essay to appear in a few days. The gist of both arguments is that, contrary to the image of these events as having been unilateral gestures by the major great power of the day, first Britain and then the United States, both were in truth wider in their origins than that. One implication is that the legitimacy of these events in affirming the Zionist project rested on wider shoulders than the distorted tales tell.
As to the Balfour Declaration, an event captured in not one but several lengthy volumes published over the years,1 the British War Cabinet would never have issued a unilateral public declaration had its major allies in the war not been in agreement as to its essence. That went for France, which had earlier issued the Cambon Letter thanks to the careful ministrations of Nahum Sokolow. It went for Italy, too. But it also went for the United States, despite the fact that it was not technically an “ally” of Britain but an “associated power.” President Wilson was shown a draft of the Declaration and approved it before it was issued; had he not approved, the British War Cabinet almost certainly would not have issued it. Put differently, at a time when there was yet no League of Nations, not to speak of a United Nations, British diplomacy amounted roughly to seeking what in our day would be a UN Security Council Resolution.
As it turned out, French approval of the Zionist project was short-lived. Though allies in the war, France and Britain were competitors before it and again after it, at least when it came to the Levantine Arab zone of the lately dismembered Ottoman Empire. French politics entered a tumultuous period just after the end of hostilities in November 1918, and in any event the high politics of Jules Cambon’s gesture never gained full traction in the French Foreign Ministry. So as Presidents and Foreign Ministers came and went with some speed after the war, French diplomatic inertia, shaped first by dour realities on the battlefield and then by perceptions of British perfidy in egging on the Arabs all the way to Damascus, swung French policy away from the Zionists back to where it has been more or less before the war. The window of opportunity in Zionism’s courtship of World War-era France was very narrow, but it turned out to be open at exactly the right time as Zionist diplomacy leveraged Anglo-French suspicions into joint support. (The same thing, if rather more stretched out in time, happened again later on: French support for Israel in the 1950s and 1960s was critical to its security, but France’s volte face into opposition in the spring of 1967 jeopardized that security.)
As for the UNSCOP affair, here the caricature, focused on the United States, offers another “great man” theory: Harry Truman is its November 1947 hero, even more than Arthur James Balfour was in November 1917. So it has come down to us that, even in Truman’s own words, the President was “Cyrus,” restoring the Jews to their ancestral home. It’s a great story, and there is much to admire in how Harry Truman comported himself at the time. Whole books have fairly recently been written based on this historical pretension.2 The only problem is that it just ain’t so.
As Kramer reminds us, the key pre-vote declaration of support for partition was not American but Soviet. And the Soviets had not just one but three General Assembly votes at the time thanks to the accepted fiction that Ukraine and Byelorussia were independent nations. Before the proliferation of General Assembly membership after the decolonization spasm of the late 1950s and early 1960s, three votes represented just shy of a tenth of the 33 votes cast in favor of partition. Soviet support, and hence the fact that the Russians and the Americans agreed, also swayed several smaller countries in the 33-13 (with ten abstentions) final vote.
More than that, while the U.S. government slapped an arms embargo on the region, the USSR armed Israel through the so-called Czechoslovak arms deal. The U.S. delegation to the United Nations also voted for UNSCR 194, which called for the repatriation of Arab refugees to Israel; the Soviet delegation voted against it.
Why? Even beyond with French coolness toward Zionism before World War I, Soviet coolness toward Zionism up to World War II was downright icy. The Soviet interpretation of Zionism was sharply negative: another petty and ideologically retrograde bourgeois nationalism. One would never have known that from the impassioned pro-Zionist speeches Andrei Gromyko made in 1947 at Flushing Meadow. What changed? What changed was that Stalin’s atavistic view that the British Empire remained the most formidable capitalist opponent to Soviet Communism led him to conclude that supporting partition was the best way to get the British out of Palestine. It so happened, as well, that the Zionists, remembering the lessons of the Balfour Declaration, set to use the U.S.-Soviet competition to their best advantage to elicit Soviet support—Kramer has details full on view.
And as with the quick reversal of French attitudes, so Soviet attitudes toward Zionism and Israel rapidly reverted to form—witness the bald anti-Semitism of the Slansky trials and the Doctors’ Plot. Being a Zionist inside the USSR again became a criminal offense. Once the British were gone from Palestine, and India too, the Soviet pro-Zionist tilt lost its realpolitik rationale. The earlier French and later Soviet window of support for Zionism each lasted about 18 months, give or take—a wink of an eye as historical time goes—sandwiched in between decades of mild or pointed hostility.
Of course it has been convenient for Zionists first to laud the British alone for the Balfour Declaration. After all, throughout the interwar period they needed the continuing help of the mandatory authority above and beyond support from any other government. (Whether they got it or not is another story, and another endless debate.) And certainly it was convenient after 1948–49 to read the Soviets out of the events of 1947, increasingly so after 1967 when Israeli reliance on U.S. support grew apace. So the distorted stories are understandable from a political perspective; that does not, however, render them accurate.
Another problem arises as well. The original form Zionism took under Theodor Herzl is often called political Zionism. It banked on receiving great power support for the Zionist project, but before World War I it failed miserably at attaining it. After Herzl died in 1904 at the age of 44, the movement shifted away from political to practical Zionism. Herzl’s successors did not give up entirely on winning support from the great powers, but they focused more on having pioneers build a Jewish society in Palestine from the bottom up, creating the necessary pre-sovereignty institutions as they went. By the onset of war in August 1914 they had achieved a going concern, if but barely. It was at that very moment, ironically, that political Zionism scored its greatest success with the Balfour Declaration.
The optic of the Balfour Declaration as a diplomatic coup remained so strong that, in the 1947–49 period of Israel’s birth, it seemed to many that Truman’s support is what created the State of Israel in yet another success of political Zionism. Many people remain today convinced that this was the case. But this is not true. The U.S. government at the time did not wholeheartedly support Israel; just as the French Foreign Ministry had quickly acted as a drag on Cambon’s tactical pro-Zionism, so the State Department and the young Defense Department and CIA quickly acted as a drag on Truman’s gesture, however pure or mixed its motives may have been. And Truman himself in 1949 followed without visible resistance his advisers in policies not at all to the liking of David Ben-Gurion and the other founding leaders of the Jewish State.
No, Israel’s birth and its history since is the doing of its people, who, for all their divisions and defects, have proved brave enough, stalwart enough, and intrepid enough to have been successful. Would Israel have come into being eventually without the Balfour Declaration and the UNSCOP vote? Alas, as with all counterfactuals, we’ll never know, but I think the answer is “probably.” We can know that without the determination and devotion of Jews to the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, and the sacrifices and the hardships they endured on its account, no number of successes of political Zionism would have sufficed. No external power can do for a people what that people is not ready to do for itself.
Besides, there was William Wilberforce. Say what?
If we look a bit deeper into history, we see that Wilberforce helped overturn a multi-millennia norm that slavery was a normal characteristic of human society; it turned out to be no great leap within a single generation no less, that just as it was morally wrong for one man to own another (singular), it was also wrong for one nation to own another (plural). There we have a key to the undermining of the legitimacy of the imperial principle, the steed Woodrow Wilson road into the palace at Versailles in 1919, and one main goad to the rise of ethno-linguistic nationalism in the latter half of the 19th century—Zionism being a one-off latecomer to the trend.
In the end, shiny or no, how are we to really understand the meaning of this centenary? How, for example, can we explain according to the rules of evidence of social science, the critically timed blink-of-an-eye support for Zionism from France in 1917 and the USSR in 1947? And how do we explain the seemingly sudden turning away of support by the two most Judeophilic Western political cultures thought to be Zionism’s greatest patrons—the British in the still-early years of the Mandate and the Americans almost immediately after the Rhodes Armistice agreements in 1949—that might have doomed the whole enterprise, but somehow didn’t.
We don’t typically find any of this passing strange, because we know how the story has gone. We have become inured to it, our curiosity short-circuited by the “all’s well that ends well” palliative we know so well. But when one ponders it with an eye ranged on raw, coldblooded probabilities, it is nothing if not passing strange. I will not press the question further, except to allude to a certain recorded three-word remark in translation once made to Pharaoh by his court magicians. And I’ll just leave it at that.
1One fairly recent example is Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Random House, 2010).
2For example, Allis and Ron Radosh, A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel (HarperCollins, 2009).