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Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
Weekend
Edition
November 11 / 12, 2006
A Dissenting Note on the Balfour Declaration
of November 2, 1917
On
the Anti-Semitism of the Present Government
By Lord MONTAGUE
I have chosen the above title for this
memorandum, not in any hostile sense, not by any means as quarrelling
with an anti-Semitic view which may be held by my colleagues,
not with a desire to deny that anti-Semitism can be held by rational
men, not even with a view to suggesting that the Government is
deliberately anti-Semitic; but I wish to place on record my view
that the policy of His Majesty's Government is anti-Semitic in
result will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every
country in the world.
This view is prompted by the
receipt yesterday of a correspondence between Lord Rothschild
and Mr. Balfour.
Lord Rothschild's letter is
dated the 18th July and Mr. Balfour's answer is to be dated August
1917. I fear that my protest comes too late, and it may well
be that the Government were practically committed when Lord Rothschild
wrote and before I became a member of the Government, for there
has obviously been some correspondence or conversation before
this letter. But I do feel that as the one Jewish Minister in
the Government I may be allowed by my colleagues an opportunity
of expressing views which may be peculiar to myself, but which
I hold very strongly and which I must ask permission to express
when opportunity affords.
I believe most firmly that
this war has been a death-blow to Internationalism, and that
it has proved an opportunity for a renewal of the slackening
sense of Nationality, for it is has not only been tacitly agreed
by most statesmen in most countries that the redistribution of
territory resulting from the war should be more or less on national
grounds, but we have learned to realise that our country stands
for principles, for aims, for civilisation which no other country
stands for in the same degree, and that in the future, whatever
may have been the case in the past, we must live and fight in
peace and in war for those aims and aspirations, and so equip
and regulate our lives and industries as to be ready whenever
and if ever we are challenged. To take one instance, the science
of Political Economy, which in its purity knows no Nationalism,
will hereafter be tempered and viewed in the light of this national
need of defence and security.The war has indeed justified patriotism
as the prime motive of political thought.
It is in this atmosphere that
the Government proposes to endorse the formation of a new nation
with a new home in Palestine. This nation will presumably be
formed of Jewish Russians, Jewish Englishmen, Jewish Roumanians,
Jewish Bulgarians, and Jewish citizens of all nations - survivors
or relations of those who have fought or laid down their lives
for the different countries which I have mentioned, at a time
when the three years that they have lived through have united
their outlook and thought more closely than ever with the countries
of which they are citizens.
Zionism has always seemed to
me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic
citizen of the United Kingdom. If a Jewish Englishman sets his
eyes on the Mount of Olives and longs for the day when he will
shake British soil from his shoes and go back to agricultural
pursuits in Palestine, he has always seemed to me to have acknowledged
aims inconsistent with British citizenship and to have admitted
that he is unfit for a share in public life in Great Britain,
or to be treated as an Englishman. I have always understood that
those who indulged in this creed were largely animated by the
restrictions upon and refusal of liberty to Jews in Russia. But
at the very time when these Jews have been acknowledged as Jewish
Russians and given all liberties, it seems to be inconceivable
that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government,
and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine
was to be reconstituted as the "national home of the Jewish
people". I do not know what this involves, but I assume
that it means that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way
for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions
of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine
in the same way that England is with the English or France with
the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will
be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will
hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine.
Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of
a religious test.
I lay down with emphasis four
principles:
1. I assert that there is
not a Jewish nation. The members of my
family, for instance, who have been in this country for
generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or
of
desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond
the fact
that they profess to a greater or less degree the same religion.
It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a
Jewish
Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian
Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation:
of
the same race, perhaps, traced back through the centuries
-
through centuries of the history of a peculiarly adaptable
race.
The Prime Minister and M. Briand are, I suppose, related
through
the ages, one as a Welshman and the other as a Breton, but
they
certainly do not belong to the same nation.
2. When the Jews are told that
Palestine is their national home,
every country will immediately desire to get rid of its
Jewish
citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving
out
its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country,
drawn
from all quarters of the globe, speaking every language
on the
face of the earth, and incapable of communicating with one
another
except by means of an interpreter. I have always understood
that
this was the consequence of the building of the Tower of
Babel, if
ever it was built, and I certainly do not dissent from the
view,
commonly held, as I have always understood, by the Jews
before
Zionism was invented, that to bring the Jews back to form
a nation
in the country from which they were dispersed would require
Divine
leadership. I have never heard it suggested, even by their
most
fervent admirers, that either Mr. Balfour or Lord Rothschild
would
prove to be the Messiah.
I claim that the lives
that British Jews have led, that the aims
that they have had before them, that the part that they
have
played in our public life and our public institutions, have
entitled them to be regarded, not as British Jews, but as
Jewish
Britons. I would willingly disfranchise every Zionist. I
would be
almost tempted to proscribe the Zionist organisation as
illegal
and against the national interest. But I would ask of a
British
Government sufficient tolerance to refuse a conclusion which
makes
aliens and foreigners by implication, if not at once by
law, of
all their Jewish fellow-citizens.
3. I deny that Palestine is
to-day associated with the Jews or
properly to be regarded as a fit place for them to live
in. The
Ten Commandments were delivered to the Jews on Sinai. It
is quite
true that Palestine plays a large part in Jewish history,
but so
it does in modern Mahommendan history, and, after the time
of the
Jews, surely it plays a larger part than any other country
in
Christian history. The Temple may have been in Palestine,
but so
was the Sermon on the Mount and the Crucifixion. I would
not deny
to Jews in Palestine equal rights to colonisation with those
who
profess other religions, but a religious test of citizenship
seems
to me to be the only admitted by those who take a bigoted
and
narrow view of one particular epoch of the history of Palestine,
and claim for the Jews a position to which they are not
entitled.
If my memory serves me
right, there are three times as many Jews
in the world as could possible get into Palestine if you
drove out
all the population that remains there now. So that only
one-third
will get back at the most, and what will happen to the remainder?
4. I can easily understand
the editors of the Morning Post and of the
New Witness being Zionists, and I am not in the least surprised
that the non-Jews of England may welcome this policy. I
have
always recognised the unpopularity, much greater than some
people
think, of my community. We have obtained a far greater share
of
this country's goods and opportunities than we are numerically
entitled to. We reach on the whole maturity earlier, and
therefore
with people of our own age we compete unfairly. Many of
us have
been exclusive in our friendships and intolerant in our
attitude,
and I can easily understand that many a non-Jew in England
wants
to get rid of us. But just as there is no community of thought
and
mode of life among Christian Englishmen, so there is not
among
Jewish Englishmen. More and more we are educated in public
schools
and at the Universities, and take our part in the politics,
in the
Army, in the Civil Service, of our country. And I am glad
to think
that the prejudices against inter-marriage are breaking
down. But
when the Jew has a national home, surely it follows that
the
impetus to deprive us of the rights of British citizenship
must be
enormously increased. Palestine will become the world's
Ghetto.
Why should the Russian give the Jew equal rights? His national
home is Palestine. Why does Lord Rothschild attach so much
importance to the difference between British and foreign
Jews? All
Jews will be foreign Jews, inhabitants of the great country
of
Palestine.
I do not know how the
fortunate third will be chosen, but the Jew
will have the choice, whatever country he belongs to, whatever
country he loves, whatever country he regards himself as
an
integral part of, between going to live with people who
are
foreigners to him, but to whom his Christian fellow-countrymen
have told him he shall belong, and of remaining as an unwelcome
guest in the country that he thought he belonged to.
I am not surprised that the
Government should take this step after the formation of a Jewish
Regiment, and I am waiting to learn that my brother, who has
been wounded in the Naval Division, or my nephew, who is in the
Grenadier Guards, will be forced by public opinion or by Army
regulations to become an officer in a regiment which will mainly
be composed of people who will not understand the only language
which he speaks - English. I can well understand that when it
was decided, and quite rightly, to force foreign Jews in this
country to serve in the Army, it was difficult to put them in
British regiments because of the language difficulty, but that
was because they were foreigners, and not because they were Jews,
and a Foreign Legion would seem to me to have been the right
thing to establish. A Jewish Legion makes the position of Jews
in other regiments more difficult and forces a nationality upon
people who have nothing in common.
I feel that the Government
are asked to be the instrument for carrying out the wishes of
a Zionist organisation largely run, as my information goes, at
any rate in the past, by men of enemy descent or birth, and by
this means have dealt a severe blow to the liberties, position
and opportunities of service of their Jewish fellow-countrymen.
I would say to Lord Rothschild
that the Government will be prepared to do everything in their
power to obtain for Jews in Palestine complete liberty of settlement
and life on an equality with the inhabitants of that country
who profess other religious beliefs. I would ask that the Government
should go no further.
E.S.M.
1917
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