Part III

At the San Remo Conference in San Remo, Italy in April 1920, the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers—Britain, France, Italy and Japan—met to define the precise boundaries of the lands they had conquered at the end of WWI. As part of a peace agreement, Turkey yielded jurisdiction over the land which it had ruled from 1517 to 1917, including the Holy Land.

Israel and two dozen other countries were created from the states of the former Ottoman Caliphate. Allen Hertz, formerly senior adviser in the privy council office serving Canada’s prime minister and the federal cabinet, explains the Ottoman Empire had been the home many peoples: Albanians, Greeks, Slavs, Copts, Armenians, Maronites, Alawis, Druze, Kurds, Arabs and Jews. For centuries, Jews lived throughout the Ottoman Empire including Constantinople, Salonika, Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, Baghdad, Basra, Tiberias, Hevron, Tsfat, Jaffa, Gaza and Jerusalem.

For Christians, even those who spoke Arabic, the Holy Land was “Palestine,” which as Allen Hertz points out, was “for centuries nothing more than an historical reference i.e., a fond memory of the early seventh century CE, when Palestine was still a province of the Roman-Byzantine Empire, where Christianity was then the official faith.”

The Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate deliberately make no mention of recognizing Palestinian Arabs as a separate and distinct people with their own national rights, explains Eli E. Hertz. The indigenous people were regarded as residents whose political identity was connected to the larger Arab nation that was divided between 1920 and 1924 by the League of Nations into several states controlled by superpowers: Iraq and Transjordan were under the British; Lebanon and Syria under French rule; and Saudi Arabia was as a separate, autonomous entity.

When the British established a Palestinian entity, Hertz adds, the Muslims were extremely apprehensive about the implications of what this meant for their future. Aside from viewing this as a victory for the Zionists and a defeat for them, some even assumed this might portend “lingering Crusader desires among the British.” The Zionists rightly understood that when the British defined the term “Palestine,” this became a significant step in realizing the establishment of a Jewish state.

French Response

Historian Martin Gilbert said that Philippe Berthelot, the French representative at San Remo, voiced his opposition to the establishment of the Jewish National Home, and pressed the British to cease implementing the Balfour Declaration. Lord Curzon, a member of the British War Cabinet and an opponent of the Jewish National Home, pointed out that “the Jews themselves attached a passionate importance to the terms of the declaration and that they would not only be disappointed but deeply incensed” if the promise had not been renewed. When Berthelot persisted, Curzon said that “the Jews themselves were really the best judges of what they wanted.”

The French “grumbled,” notes historian Bernard Wasserstein, but relented because they were “compelled, both by their weakness on the ground in Palestine and by their need for British support elsewhere to recognize Britain as ruler of Palestine.”

It is worth noting that before the British issued the Balfour Declaration, the French Government sent a declaration supporting the “development of Jewish colonization in Palestine.” The letter of June 4, 1917, was signed by Jules Cambon, secretary-general of the French Foreign Office, to Nahum Sokolow, a member of the executive of the World Zionist Organization, after he met French officials to solicit their support.

The letter read: “You were good enough to present the project to which you are devoting your efforts, which has for its object the development of Jewish colonization in Palestine. You consider that, circumstances permitting, and the independence of the Holy Places being safeguarded on the other hand, it would be a deed of justice and of reparation to assist, by the protection of the Allied Powers, in the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that Land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago.

“The French Government, which entered this present war to defend a people wrongfully attacked, and which continues the struggle to assure the victory of right over might, can but feel sympathy for your cause, the triumph of which is bound up with that of the Allies.

“I am happy to give you herewith such assurance.”

Had the French vetoed the Balfour Declaration during the spring and summer of 1917, the declaration would have been essentially dead, historian Arthur Hertzberg declared..

The United States Response

Though the United States was not yet a member of the League of Nations, the American government did not want Palestine disposed of without its approval, Judge Simon Hirsch Rifkind stressed. America had contributed its military, weapons and funding to secure the victory which resulted in the Turks ceding their rights to Palestine.

The Lodge Fish Resolution

The British and the Council of the League, he said, acknowledged on June 30, 1922, a joint resolution (the Lodge Fish Resolution) of both Houses of Congress of the United States unanimously endorsed the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” confirming the irrevocable right of Jews to settle in the area of Palestine—anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea: “Favoring the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

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

Dr. Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.