298 DESTINY DISRUPTED
only demanded independence from the Ottomans and Europeans but also
from the Hashimites and Saudis.
Then there was one last problematic ingredient, perhaps the most in-
tractable of them all: Jewish immigration from Europe to Palestine. Euro-
pean anti-Semitism, which had helped give rise to Zionism, had continued
to intensify as the continent moved toward war, making life ever more un-
tenable for Jews throughout Europe. As a result, the Jewish population of
Palestine swelled from 4 percent in 1883 to 8 percent by the start ofWorld
War I to nearly 13 percent by the time the war ended.
In 1917, the British foreign minister Arthur James Balfour wrote a let-
ter to Lord Lionel Rothschild, a British banker and a leading Zionist, a
man who had supported Jewish immigration to the Levant generously out
of his own private funds. Balfour told Rothschild that the British govern-
ment would "view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate
the achievement of this object."
Balfour also insisted that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice
the civil and religious right of existing non-Jewish communities in Pales-
tine," but how Britain planned to accommodate both Jewish and Arab na-
tionalism in the same territory, Balfour didn't say.
To recap-it's worth a recap: Britain essentially promised the same ter-
ritory to the Hashimites, the Saudis, and the Zionists of Europe, territory
actually inhabited by still another Arab people with rapidly developing
nationalist aspirations of their own-while in fact Britain and France had
already secretly agreed to carve up the whole promised territory between
themselves. Despite the many quibbles, qualifiers, and disclaimers offered
over the years about who agreed to what and what was promised to
whom, that's the gist of the situation, and it guaranteed an explosion in
the future.
But the good thing about the future was that it lay in the future. In the
present a war was raging, and what the British and French cooked up for
the short term worked wonderfully: the CUP lost everything the Ot-
tomans had ever owned outside of Asia Minor. They ceded Palestine,
Greater Syria, and Mesopotamia to the British. And the war was going
badly for their friends in Europe, as well. In 1918, Germany surrendered