A Concise History of the Middle East

Britain and the Palestine Problem • 277

forget that most of the olim soon lost their zeal for this risky and unre¬

warding adventure. Hot summers, windy and rainy winters, malarial

swamps, rocky hills, sandy desert soil, and frequent crop failures dimmed

the fervor of many young pioneers. Arab nomads and peasants raided the

kibbutzim. Their cousins in Jaffa and Jerusalem eyed Zionism with suspi¬

cion. As their own nationalist feelings grew, the Arabs understandably op¬

posed a colonization scheme that seemed likely to dispossess them, reduce

them to second-class status, or break up Syria. Already they were protest¬

ing in their press and in the Ottoman parliament against these foreign set¬

tlers and their plans to build up a Jewish state in Palestine. The Ottoman

government, both before and after the 1908 Young Turk revolution, ob¬

structed Jewish colonization for fear of adding yet another nationality

problem to those in the Balkans and the Arab lands that were already tear¬

ing its empire apart. No European government would risk offending Is¬

tanbul by supporting Jewish settlement in Palestine.

BRITAIN AND THE PALESTINE PROBLEM

World War I was the third event that saved political Zionism. Both sides
thought they needed Jewish backing. In 1914 Berlin was the main center of
the Zionist movement. Most politically articulate Jews lived in (and backed)
the countries that made up the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary,
and the Ottoman Empire. Up to 1917, when the US entered World War I on
the side of the Allies, American Jews tended to favor the Central Powers be¬
cause they hated the tyranny of czarist Russia, from which so many Jews
had barely managed to escape. The overthrow of the regime in March 1917
made Russia easier to support, but now the issue facing its new government
(which most Russian Jews favored) was how to stay in the war at all. That
year was crucial in World War I. Germany, too, wanted Jewish support but
could not espouse Zionism owing to its ties with the Ottoman Empire,
which still held Palestine. This is when the British government stepped in.

The Balfour Declaration

Britain, though it had relatively few Jewish subjects, could speak out most
forcefully for Zionism. There the leading Zionist advocate was Chaim Weiz-
mann, a chemist who won fame early in the war by synthesizing acetone, a
chemical (hitherto imported from Germany) used in making explosives.
Weizmann's discoveries made him known to leading journalists and thus
to cabinet ministers. The prime minister, Lloyd George, had come to favor