For over fifty years the purpose and significance of the Balfour Declaration have been hotly debated by historians, who have judged British motivation as primarily imperialist, a propaganda imperative, or, more recently, anti-Semitic. James Renton's reexamination of British policy toward the Zionist movement in the First World War, and the nature of the Anglo-Zionist alliance, offers a new lens through which to view the circumstances surrounding this declaration.
Central to his analysis is the mind-set of British policy makers who perceived international Jewry as a racially ethnic group with a powerful collective identity in which Zionist ideals were deeply entrenched. This imagined view of “otherness” was further qualified after 1914 by a more hostile animus that suspected Jews of pro-German sympathies and an empathy with revolutionary socialism and pacifist ideology. The alliance was born when fighting on the western front had reached a military stalemate, and foreign policy makers in both the entente and central powers were turning to ideas of national identity and nationalism as a means of harnessing the support of ethnic groups.
Renton's point of departure from previous scholarship is his premise that a small coterie of Russian Zionists, newly arrived in Britain, played on these preoccupations as a means of furthering their own political aims. Supported by American and Egyptian Jewish activists, they made overtures to government advisors calculated to harmonize with British elite thought on the broad issues of ethnicity and nationalism. The initial diplomacy of a Russian journalist, Jabotinsky, later joined by Weizmann and Sokolow, endorsed misplaced British perceptions of Jewish collective power and convinced the government that by identifying with a Jewish return to the Holy Land, Britain would attract great support from worldwide Jewry. The Zionists’ masquerade disguised the reality of a highly pluralist and complex Jewish diaspora in which Zionist ideals played but a minor part. The British government was not asked to accept Zionism for its own sake but as a means of changing Jewish perceptions of the war (71). This proposition offered a solution to their fears of the Jews and formed the basis of the Anglo-Zionist alliance.
Renton's analysis is rooted in the overarching significance of propaganda to the adversaries in the “first bidding war for the hearts and minds of ethnic groups” (5). Britain's heavy reliance on the United States for financial, material, and, later, military support made American public opinion a crucial concern. Case studies of Irish Americans and American Poles, also perceived to be pro-German, are offered by Renton to support his theory that British foreign policy makers, bent on influencing ethnic opinion in the United States, viewed many such groups in the broad context of national aspirations. American Jews were plainly not their only concern, but his point fails to acknowledge the distinct and long-term racial antagonism toward Jewry that was absent from British politicians’ wartime fear of other ethnic groups.
Following the March Revolution in Russia, Jabotinsky advised the government that a pro-Zionist policy could reverse socialist and pacifist sympathies among the Russian Jewish proletariat. Weizmann's warning of imminent German pro-Zionist activity, together with the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Russia, required an urgent public statement by the alliance. The Balfour Declaration was, in Renton's opinion, timed to be the first propaganda step to capture Jewish support. Its vagueness allowed a myth to be created for worldwide Jewry that a historic national rebirth in Palestine was imminent, through Britain's benevolence and under its auspices.
The sophisticated and prolific Anglo-Zionist propaganda campaign has received little previous attention from historians but was, Renton suggests, the crux of the alliance. The Zionist Masquerade gives detailed insight into the nature and diversity of the material produced, with a strong accent on visual imagery through film, illustrated lectures, posters, and Yiddish plays, which emphasized Jewish culture and history. It was financed and produced by the British Ministry of Information, which, at Jabotinsky's suggestion, contained a dedicated Jewish section after December 1917, staffed by Zionists. Renton's later exploration of its impact on its principal target, the American Jews, confirmed the fluidity and complexity of their multilayered identity, centered particularly in wartime on American patriotism.
Renton considers that the Zionist Commission, the Jewish Legion (Jabotinsky's brainchild in which immigrant Jewish soldiers from Britain, the United States, and Palestine were deployed), and the American Zionist Medical Unit were merely visible propaganda symbols in Palestine. Despite the extensive and expensive outward show for world Jewry, few efforts were made in Palestine itself to begin the creation of a Jewish national home, in part to obviate Arab fears. The absence of any British quid pro quo became increasingly apparent to Zionist supporters, fulfilling Moses Gaster's warning before the declaration that the Jews were only pawns in the political games of the great powers.
The Zionist Masquerade argues that “at every stage, the Government's interest in using Zionism derived from proposals put forward by Jews, who conceived the rationale and objectives of this policy” (70). This does not readily accommodate Lloyd George's political ambitions in Palestine, such as deflecting French territorial interests, which formed no part of the Zionists’ strategy, and lay outside the need for purely pro-Allied propaganda.
Renton's scrutiny of Imperial War Museum archives plausibly reestablishes the importance of propaganda in the government's motives for the Balfour Declaration, and his premise that foreign policy makers were influenced by thoughts of ethnic power and national identity offers a nuanced perspective on the Anglo-Zionist relationship. His engaging analysis strongly challenges the view that the Zionists played little part in events surrounding the declaration. It also argues against opinion that it was a Zionist victory and that Weizmann played the leading role from the outset in the wartime Anglo-Zionist alliance. Renton agrees that the Balfour Declaration was one of Britain's “greatest imperial mistakes” (E. Monroe, Britain's Moment in the Middle East, 1914–1956 [London, 1963], 43) but judges that among its unforeseen and more positive effects was the establishment of Zionism as a visible force in Palestine.
