Balfour After a Century

A century ago:

Many commentators have already analyzed the Balfour Declaration before its centennial, and there is little point in repeating their observations here. Let me make just a few points:

As I noted just two days ago, the occupation of Beersheba by Allenby on October 31,1917, was the first real British foothold inside Ottoman Palestine (unless we count the occupation of Aqaba by the Arab Revolt). Beersheba was seen as the Biblical southern boundary of Ancient Israel (from Dan to Beersheba), and two days after Britain acquired a tenuous hold there, the British Foreign Secretary made a commitment, ambiguous and hedged with conditions as it is, to the future of Palestine, then still under Ottoman control.

Now, under the Sykes-Picot agreement France and Britain had envisioned an international regime for part of Palestine including Jerusalem. But Sykes-Picot was a secret agreement, unknown to Lord Rothschild or Chaim Weizmann on November 2. (But not for long: on November 23, the new Bolshevik regime in Russia published the text in Pravda and Izvestia.) And then of course there was the Hussein-McMahon correspondence which promised Sharif Hussein territories argued about ever since.

Generations have noted that the "Promised Land" was promised to several different parties, even though Britain did not even control the territory in question. But 1917 was still an age of imperialism, and the idea that Great Powers could decide the fate of "lesser" countries. (Bonus question: Has this really changed that much?)

Israelis today are more likely to point to the League of Nations Palestine Mandate and/or the 1947 UN Partition Resolution as the legal basis for the state, since these had international legitimacy, and were not simply the diktat of a single Great Power.

To save space, I will avoid the question of what a "national home" meant or how it could be created without prejudicing the rights of "the non-Jewish communties of Palestine."

Arthur James Balfour had served as Prime Minister and First Lord of the Admiralty before becoming Foreign Secretary. But despite his long political career, his name will forever be attached to a single, run-on 67-word sentence sent a century ago today.

April 1916: The Easter Rising and its Echoes in Egyptian, Indian, and Zionist Nationalist Thought, Part III: Zionism

Briscoe as Lord Mayor of Dublin

The late, great baseball catcher and folk philosopher Yogi Berra, who sadly died last year, is credited with many quotes, some of which he may actually have said. One goes like this: when Yogi was told in the 1950s that the visiting Lord Mayor of Dublin, Robert Briscoe, was Jewish, Yogi responded, "only in America."

Robert Briscoe was not only the first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin (his son later held the same job): he was a veteran of the original IRA, a gun-runner in the War of Irish independence, but also a fervent Zionist and a friend of Revisionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky. When Jabotinsky visited Ireland as part of a European tour in 1938, Briscoe introduced him to Prime Minister Éamon de Valera, and reportedly advised Jabotinsky on how to fight the British.

Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog

Briscoe is just one example of the intersection of Irish nationalism and the Zionist movement. Briscoe during his Irish political career was a member of the Fianna Fáil party, after its split with Sinn Féin, but the Chief Rabbi of Ireland from 1919 to 1936, and before that Rabbi of Dublin, Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog,  supported the Irish war of independence, spoke the Irish language fluently, and was both an avid Irish republican and committed Zionist. He came to be nicknamed "the Sinn Féin rebbe." When the Free State won independence his appointment as Chief Rabbi was formalized.In 1936 he moved to Palestine, became Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Palestine, and later the first Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel. One of his sons, Chaim Herzog, became a general, Ambassador to the United Nations, and the sixth President of Israel, while a grandson, Yitzhak or Isaac Herzog, is head of the Labor party/Zionist Union and current Leader of the Opposition in the Knesset.

As World War II approached, the mainstream Zionist movement, including the Haganah, agreed to support British war aims for the duration. The Revisionists and their armed wings, Irgun or the IZL and Lehi or the Stern Gang, continued to resist British rule during the war.Thy were able to point to the Easter Rising of 1916 as a model, since the rebels fought Britain while it was at war with Germany.Avraham Stern, founder of LEHI, arranged to have P.S. O'Hegerty's The Victory of Sinn Féin translated into Hebrew. IZL and Lehi both drew inspiration from the guerilla war in Ireland between 1919 and 1921 and the tactics of Michael Collins, and LEHI underground operative Yitzhak Yezernitsky, who would eventually become Israel's seventh Prime Minister as Yitzhak Shamir, adopted the nom de guerre "Michael" after Collins. (Another underground pseudonym was "Rabbi Shamir," from which the would take his Hebrew name.)

There are other  parallels. Irish republican and Land reformer Michael Davitt, mentioned in Part II as an inspiration for Gandhi's nonviolence, famously published an investigation of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 (then in Russia but today Chisinau in Moldova), and subsequently expessed his sympathies for Zionism. Davitt is said to have been the first to apply the English word  "pale," originally used to refer to the area reserved for English settlement in Ireland, to the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Russia.

Not all parallels apply. Arthur James Balfour became a hero to the Zionists for the Balfour Declaration, but as Secretary for Ireland had been a staunch opponent of Home Rule, but as I hope these three posts have shown, the events of Easter 1916 an the war of independence that followed inspired national movements elsewhere; the list could be longer.