Books New and Old
The British Cornerstone of Zionism
R. SIDEBOTHAM refers to himself modestly as a M student of war. [England and Palestine: Essays toward the Restoration of the Jewish State. Constable & Co., 1918. pp. xi 257.] He is a great deal more than that. He is a student of politics, and if he modestly disclaims any independent views on history, he has, as he states, followed good guides there, too. Indeed, a very large portion of the book (pp. 1-109) is devoted to an historical survey of Palestine from the earliest times till Napoleon’s Syrian campaign, and it is not till then that the subject proper of the volume is begun with the chapter on the “Old British Policv in Turkev.”
Of that policy, he is a severe critic. It was based almost wholly on considerations of the safety of British possessions and interests in the East, particularly India. Egypt itself, large as Egypt now looms in the organism of the Empire, was conceived originally as an element in securing the greater object. And if the safety of India was the aflırmative element in the old British policy, fear of Russia was the negative element. That is to say, English policy was based on India and determined practically by the imagined need of countering any movement that tended to aggrandize Russia’s influence in the East or anywhere else.
Mr. Sidebotham is quite convinced that it was a wrong policy especially after 1870 and the rapidly rising power of Prussia-Germany. Compared to the dangers that were present in German ambitions, the Russian danger, he believes, was a mere rush-light taper. Further, he holds that the acquisition of the Suez Canal removed the only reason for the traditional British principle that the integrity of Turkey must be maintained. After that, it followed "that we (England) had better make our terms with both Russia and France."
Mr. Sidebotham writes in January, 1918, when an allied victory was demonstrably assured in spite of the long advertised German offensive scheduled for the spring. German failure in the East (p. 172) was particularly striking. Yet Gallipoli, Kut-el-Amara, the Dardanelles, the failure of Murray and the march of Jemal almost to the very edge of the canal were reminders that the danger had been great indeed, that the wind of disaster had blown with perilous closeness to the heart of the British imperial structure, and that in the old Roman phrase, —which the British with marked justice apply to themselves —the Fortune of the state, its embodied and indefectible good luck, had checked and overcome its enemies.
But it is very doubtful whether the matter is as simple as the author will have us believe. It is a fashion among Englishmen to assert that their foreign and domestic policy is a succession of blunders that fail to be criminal only because their adversaries make still greater ones. Mr. Sidebotham does a deal of repining. Many things would not
have happened, many losses might have been averted, the entire war would never have occurred, if, at the crucial moment, the British policy had been changed in the directions suggested. It is an easy form of reversed prophecy and a safe one,—because of the sheer impossibility of dis- proof. On some matters he is certainly right. A Stratford de Redcliffe at Constantinople would not have overlooked the latent possibilities in the Asiatic railroad concessions,— in spite of British disinclination to mix up railroading with politics, —a disinclination which, on our side of the water, is of course incomprehensible. But that the Russian danger was unreal, and that an understanding with Russia could easily have been arrived at, is not at all certain. What passed as the Russian government then was a corrupt and mongrel court and a debauched and treacherous bureaucracy. When England felt herself compelled to settle her difieulties with Russia, she was forced to pay a hard and bitter price, as in the sacrifice of Persia to the vultures, and, as always in the case of blackmail, Russia’s demands became larger and bolder every year. Added to that, as we now know, and as many suspected long before, was the ever-present danger that when the Prussian dominant caste offered more, Russia would have betrayed her ally or confederate without a tremor. It is quite plain, by the event, that the British policy in Turkey was wrong. But it is not so plain what that policy should have been.
The last chapters of the book (pp. 173-245) deal with the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Mr. Sidebotham’s arguments are frankly and healthily British. The Suez Canal itself cannot be defended, even by a power that holds the sea. The creation of a buffer across Sinai, becomes accordingly imperative. That could take the form of a wholly independent state or a British dependency. Both experience in the case of Afghanistan, and human probabilities indicate that the second alternative is the better one. The author justly maintains that only the British have been able to combine imperial pretensions with liberty.
But if it is to be a state of the British "colonial" form, who are to be the colonists? Mr. Sidebotham on purely theoretical grounds argues that they can be no other than the Jews, so that if Zionism did not already exist, it would be an essential part of British policy to create it. In this he states nothing new, but it is worth while recalling to those many men who seem to believe that British interest in Zionism began with the Balfour declaration and was a by-product of this war. It was a question almost of practical politics as early as 1840 (p. 118), and when it receded from that position, the matter was kept alive by the agitation and interest of private persons. Mr. Sidebotham is therefore on solid British ground when he demonstrates that for the Jews and the Jews only Palestine can present the necessary emotional and practical attractions to make the erection of a buffer state there a realizable project.
From military considerations, British interests would