Notes Introduction 1 The principal works were Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Ilan Pappé, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–1951 (Basingstoke: Macmillan in associa- tion with St. Antony’s College Oxford, 1988); Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). 2 On the origins of this myth, see pp. 85–87. 3 In particular, see Barbara Tuchman, The Bible and the Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (New York: New York University Press, 1956), pp. xiv, 311–312, 337; Franz Kobler, The Vision was There: A History of the British Movement for the Restoration of the Jews (London: Lincolns-Prager, 1956), pp. 117–124; David Fromkin, A Peace to End all Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Avon Books, 1989), pp. 267–268, 283, 298; Ronald Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem: A History of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1983), pp. 73–74, 615. 4 Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1961). 5 Ibid., pp. 549–550. In his explanation of the Balfour Declaration David Lloyd George himself had emphasised the importance of the need for pro- Allied propaganda among Jewry. David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, Vol. II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), pp. 723–724. 6 Mayir Vereté, ‘The Balfour Declaration and its Makers’, Middle Eastern Studies, 6, 1 (Jan. 1970), in Norman Rose (ed.), From Palmerston to Balfour: Collected Essays of Mayir Vereté (London: Frank Cass, 1992), pp. 1–38; Isaiah Friedman The Question of Palestine, British-Jewish-Arab Relations: 1914–1918 (New Jersey: Transaction, 2nd ed., 1992). 7 Jon Kimche, The Unromantics: The Great Powers and the Balfour Declaration (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Published under the auspices of the Anglo-Israel Association, 1968), pp. 34, 39, 43; Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), pp. 123–126; idem. ‘Israel in Embryo’, New York Review of Books, 15 Mar. 1984, pp. 34–38. 8 David Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), pp. 269, 299–301; Frank Hardie and Irwin Herrman, Britain and Zion: The Fateful Entanglement (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1980), pp. viii–ix. For a recent exposi- tion of this argument, see D.K. Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism in the Middle East 1914–1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 130–147. For an early exception that dismissed the Palestine issue, see D.Z. Gillon, ‘The Antecedents of the Balfour Declaration’, Middle Eastern Studies, 5, 2 (May 1969), pp. 131–150. 156 Notes 157 9 Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase, pp. 190–191; Jonathan Frankel ‘An Intro- ductory Essay – The Paradoxical Politics of Marginality: Thoughts on the Jewish Situation During the Years 1914–1921’, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 4 (1988), pp. 13–18; Elie Kedourie, ‘Sir Mark Sykes and Palestine 1915–16’, in idem. Arabic Political Memoirs and other Studies (London: Frank Cass, 1974), p. 239; Chimen Abramsky, War, Revolution and the Jewish Dilemma (London: H.K. Lewis 1975), pp. 12–16; Ephraim Karsh and Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789–1923 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 252. 10 Mark Levene, ‘The Balfour Declaration: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, English Historical Review, 107, 422 (Jan. 1992), pp. 54–77; idem. War, Jews, and the New Europe: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914–1919 (Oxford: Published for the Littman Library by Oxford University Press, 1992), Chs. 4 and 6; Sharman Kadish, Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution (London: Frank Cass, 1992), Ch. 4; Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate – Translated by Haim Watzman (London: Little, Brown and Company, 2000), pp. 33–49. 11 The concept of the foreign policy-making elite was first advanced by Donald Cameron Watt. D.C. Watt, Personalities and Policies (London: Longmans, 1965), pp. 1–18. For recent studies of British foreign policy that have furthered this approach, see Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia, 1894–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), and idem. Britain, the Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Versailles Settlement, 1919–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). On the homo- geneity of the Foreign Office during this period, see Zara Steiner, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 19–20, 174, 210. 12 In this study I will draw upon Anthony D. Smith’s typology of a national community – a singular collective body of individuals, or mass, which is perceived to have a particular character or soul, intrinsically linked to and defined by its national landscapes, language, culture and historical mytho- logy. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 170–208. 13 See Kimche, Unromantics, p. 40; Friedman, Question of Palestine, pp. 55, 289, 291–292, 296, 299; Stein, Balfour Declaration, pp. 577–578. 14 Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), pp. 161–162. On the dilapidated condition of the World Zionist Organization prior to the outbreak of war, see Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase, Chs. 1 and 2. 15 Melvyn I. Urofsky, American Zionism: From Herzl to the Holocaust (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), Chs. 4 and 5; Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: the Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 71–72. 16 See Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Gitelman, Jewish Nationality, pp. 71–82. 158 Notes 17 See, in particular, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2nd ed. 1991); Homi Bhaba (ed.), Nation and Narration (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); Laurence J. Silberstein, The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), Chs. 1, 4–6. 18 See, for example, Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 1992), pp. 9–11, 123; Etienne Balibar, ‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology’ in idem. and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 86–87, 93–97. 19 This effort to contextualise British perceptions of Jews follows the work of David Feldman on Jews and English society before the First World War. David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). 20 In her analysis of ‘non-Jewish Zionism’ and why British policy-makers were attracted to the Zionist ideal, Regina Sharif has also emphasised the significance of racial and nationalist ideas. However, Sharif does not connect these views to the political rationale behind the Balfour Declaration, which she sees as a product of British imperialism. See Regina Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism (London: Zed Press, 1983), pp. 4, 43, 75–84. 21 I am most grateful to Mark Mazower for discussing this point with me. 22 On this subject, see in particular, Elie Kedourie, England and the Middle East: the Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1921 (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1956); Jukka Nevakivi, Britain, France and the Arab Middle East, 1914–1920 (London: Athlone Press, 1969); B.C. Busch, Britain, India and the Arabs, 1914–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 23 See Elie Kedourie, In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and its Interpretations, 1914–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), and Isaiah Friedman, Palestine: A Twice Promised Land? Vol. I, The British, The Arabs and Zionism, 1915–1920 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2000). 24 Kedourie, Anglo-Arab Labyrinth, pp. 209–212, 216–220. 25 Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, pp. 10–13. 26 James Joll, 1914: The Unspoken Assumptions: An Inaugural Lecture (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968). 27 See, in particular, Zara Steiner, ‘Elitism and Foreign Policy: The Foreign Office before the Great War’, in B.J.C. McKercher and D.J. Moss (eds), Shadow and Substance in British Foreign Policy, 1895–1939: Memorial Essays Honouring C.J. Lowe (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1984), pp. 19–55; Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar; idem. Collapse of the Versailles Settlement; T.G. Otte, ‘Eyre Crowe and British Foreign Policy: A Cognitive Map’, in idem. and C.A. Pagedas (eds), Personalities, War and Diplomacy: Essays in International History (London: Frank Cass, 1997), pp. 14–37. Much of the growing body of work on culture and foreign policy-making has been on the USA, and has largely overlooked Britain. For an instructive overview of the literature, see Andrew J. Rotter, ‘Culture’, in Patrick Finney (ed.), Notes 159 Palgrave Advances in International History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 267–299. 28 Stein, Balfour Declaration; Jehuda Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); idem. ‘The Balfour Declaration and Its Maker: A Reassessment’, Journal of Modern History, 64, 3 (Sept. 1992), pp. 455–499; Friedman, Question of Palestine; Sanders, High Walls; Norman Rose, Chaim Weizmann: A Biography (New York: Viking 1986), Chs.