Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday September 28, 2010
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THE BALFOUR DECLARATION: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Jonathan Schneer
Random House
ISBN 978-1400065325
432 pages
$30
Reviewed by Eugene Rogan
On Nov. 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour transformed the future of the Middle East in 18 words: "His rat Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."
Before that date, Zionism was a marginal movement that divided Jews and was dismissed by gentiles. After the Balfour Declaration, the Jewish national project enjoyed the support of the leading imperial power of the age. Though he was not to know it at the time, the British foreign secretary had laid the foundations for the state of Israel and a conflict between Arabs and Zionists that, nearly a century later, remains unresolved.
British historian Jonathan Schneer has produced a remarkable book on this complex and divisive subject. His "Balfour Declaration" is engagingly written, adding to our knowledge of this frequently told story without ever taking sides.
The novelty of the book lies in the way he tells the story. Schneer sets the Zionist struggle for recognition in the context of Britain's conflicting promises to Arabs, Jews and its European allies as part of its desperate bid to defeat Germany in World War I. Britain supported these movements more for their utility to its own war effort than out of conviction.
The Arab movement was first to secure British support. When the Ottomans entered the war on Germany's side in November 1914, the Germans pressed the Ottoman Sultan to declare a jihad -- a religious war against the British and French. Germany hoped by this means to provoke internal uprisings in India and North Africa that would weaken Britain and France and hasten their defeat in the war. The Ottoman call for jihad raised genuine concern in British government circles, and they sought an influential Muslim ally to counter this threat.
Sharif Hussein of Mecca enjoyed wide respect as a descendant of the prophet Muhammad and as the leading religious figure in Islam's holiest city. Shortly after the Ottoman call for jihad, the British government entered into correspondence with the Sharif to encourage him to lead an Arab revolt against the Ottomans. The Arab statesman drove a hard bargain and secured from Britain promises of arms, grain and gold to sustain a revolt, and recognition of a vast Arab kingdom under his rule in the event his movement succeeded. In June 1916, the Sharif declared his own jihad, this one against the Ottomans, and activated a strategic alliance with the British.
The Zionists had a much harder time engaging the interest of British officials at first. As late as 1913, the chief diplomat of the World Zionist Organization, Nahum Sokolow, could get a hearing at no higher a level than the private secretaries of foreign office officials -- and with little effect. As one foreign office mandarin advised his aide after a meeting with Sokolow, "We had better not intervene to support the Zionist movement."
In addition, Zionism divided British Jews. The Jewish elite of wealthy businessmen and politicians known as the "Cousinhood" advocated assimilation to mainstream society as the solution to anti-Semitism. They rejected the Zionist assertion of a distinct Jewish national identity, as they believed it encouraged the view that Jews were always strangers in their land of birth. "No wonder that all anti-Semites are enthusiastic Zionists," mused Claude Montefiore, a leading member of the Cousinhood.
Chaim Weizmann proved essential to securing support for Zionism among powerful members of the Cousinhood and leading British politicians. Born in Russia in 1874, he fled czarist anti-Semitism to study chemistry in Germany and Switzerland, and moved to England to take up a post in the University of Manchester in 1904. He became a British subject only in 1910.
Schneer brilliantly captures Weizmann's rise, in which he used social contacts with the influential Rothschild family and discussions with liberal newspaper editor C.P. Scott to secure meetings with Balfour in December 1914 and Minister of Munitions David Lloyd George in January 1915.
Lloyd George and Balfour believed their support for Zionism would advance British war aims. They thought American Jews would encourage their government to enter the war, and Russian Jews would throw their weight behind the czar's efforts to ensure Germany's defeat and the creation of a Jewish national home under British sponsorship. Moreover, they believed that support for Jewish nationalism might advance Britain's territorial ambitions in Palestine. Having secretly agreed with France in 1916 to place Palestine under an international administration, Balfour saw an opportunity to use Zionism to gain international support to place the Holy Lands under British rule instead.
Yet even as they obtained British support for their cause, the Zionists sought accommodation with the Arabs. Given the care with which Schneer develops the parallel tracks of Zionist and Arabist politics, it is surprising that he fails to mention the direct negotiations conducted between the two sides towards the end of the war. The tireless Weizmann traveled from Europe to meet Amir Faisal, commander of the Arab revolt, in Transjordan in June 1918, and they later signed a formal agreement of mutual support between a future "Arab State" and a Jewish "Palestine." Yet as both Arabs and Jews were to learn, Britain's support was not to be trusted. With the British army caught in a murderous stalemate on the Western Front, Lloyd George (now the prime minister) actively pursued a separate peace with the Turks that would have left the Arab world under nominal Ottoman rule. Indeed, Schneer documents no fewer than five different initiatives to secure an Anglo-Ottoman peace, any one of which would have denied both the Arabists and the Zionists their objectives.
Previous authors have argued that, in pursuit of its wartime interest, Britain had promised Palestine to three parties -- Arabs, Jews and international overseers. Schneer has convincingly demonstrated that, had the British managed to detach the Ottomans from Germany, the British would have been just as happy leaving the country to the Turks. Clear and balanced, this is the most original exposition of the Balfour Declaration to date.
Eugene Rogan teaches the modern history of the Middle East at the University of Oxford and is author of "The Arabs: A History."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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BIG GIRLS DON'T CRY: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women
Rebecca Traister
Free Press
ISBN 978-1-4391-5028-3
336 pages
$26
Reviewed by Connie Schultz
In the early pages of "Big Girls Don't Cry," Salon's Rebecca Traister seems determined to alienate every female reader over 40. Had I fallen for her false start, I would have missed her considerable contributions to the ongoing feminist narrative described by Gloria Steinem as the "revolution from within."
At first, Traister gleefully harpoons the warriors of old to explain why her younger generation is done with antiquated notions of feminism. Consider, for example, her description of the women at a nonpartisan, pro-abortion-rights gathering: "It was a crowd of monied, Botoxed, electorally enthralled dames who, in the popular imagination of the time, should have had 'Hillary '08' mown into their Hamptons house topiary, if not their bikini lines." That comes a mere four pages after she argues that, if young women are to care about feminism, the "conversation had to be drained of some of its earnest piety. Talking about gender in the new millennium required us, I thought, to get over ourselves a little bit, to dispense with the sacred cows, to question power and cultivate new ideas and leaders."
Hillary Clinton had allowed her husband "to play her for a fool," Traister writes, before embarking on her quest to become "the most powerful girl on the Senate floor." A few pages later, Traister offers Princeton University associate professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell's parsing of Elizabeth Edwards' popularity: "A fat woman married to a good-looking man is always a good story, particularly if she is a breast cancer survivor who has lost a child."
Whew.
By the middle of Chapter 2, Traister's book felt increasingly like the minutes of the Mean Girls Club -- and a waste of this 53-year-old woman's time. But with age comes patience. Good thing, too. I ended up admiring Traister and loving her book. In its best parts, it is a raw and brave memoir of a journalist who discovered that all is not well for women in America, and a description of how she and other young women are laying claim to their rightful place in the fight.
Traister offers a first glimpse into her reluctant but hopeful heart when she describes following Michelle Obama on the campaign trail in late 2007: "It was November in rural Iowa, and between the Hopperesque towns in which we were stopping we drove through farmland, and brittle leaves blew across the road. I had thrown some CDs into my bag, and at some point on the drive to Michelle's next stump stomp, on a crisp bright day following this crisp, bright woman, Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are A Changing' began to play. I was thirty-three years old; I had no memories of the 1960s, in which the modern civil rights movement took hold, or of the 1970s, in which second-wave feminism bloomed. But I felt for a few minutes as though, on some small highway east of everything urban in Iowa, I was living in the most powerful historic moment of my lifetime, as if the country I'd grown up in, with its rules and limitations and assumptions about who can do what and who can be what, was finally beginning to fulfill Dylan's decades-old promise."
Traister started out supporting John Edwards and opposed even the notion of President Hillary Clinton, but ended up sobbing when Clinton conceded. The author is at her best when she explores the confusion and contradictions swirling within -- and without. Boldly, she takes on the "frat boys" at MSNBC, as well as the many young, white males on Daily Kos and in the Obama campaign who trafficked in sexist and misogynist attacks on Clinton.
"A pattern was emerging in the liberal, privileged, predominantly white climes in which I worked and lived: young men were starry-eyed about Obama and puffed with outsized antipathy toward Clinton. ... I was made uncomfortable by the persistent note of aggression that marked their reactions to Clinton, and puzzled by the increasingly cult-like devotion to Obama, a man whose policy positions were not so different, after all, from those of his opponent. Hating Hillary had for decades been the provenance of Republican blowhards, but now men on the left were spewing vitriol about her voice, her looks, her presumption -- and without realizing it were radicalizing me in my support for Clinton more than the candidate herself ever could have."
Despite the setbacks and disappointments, Traister believes the 2008 presidential race breathed new life into the women's movement, in part because she felt a new generation came to own it. Such a youthful embrace of the women's work yet to be done is exhilarating -- for her generation and for mine.
And therein lies my only caveat, which Traister may see as a matronly reprimand: Do resist tagging all of us over-50 feminists as dour discards. Your youthful vision is better than our crinkled eyes for navigating the future, but we hold your history in our hearts. We are still in the fight, increasingly with men foolish enough to mistake a woman's sags for surrender. We were once you, and one day you will be us.
Connie Schultz is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and an essayist for Parade magazine.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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