On Vertical Alliances Perfidious Albion

ISRAEL
On Vertical Alliances, ‘Perfidious Albion’ and

the Security Paradigm
Reflections on the Balfour Declaration Centennial and
the Winding Road to Israeli Independence
Arie M. Dubnov
Abstract
Revisiting the Balfour Declaration, this article offers a threefold argument: first, chal-
lenging those who read the Declaration as symbolizing a new dawn of Jewish political
history, the article proposes an alternative reading that considers it as a continuation
of familiar patterns of Jewish political behaviour based on the forging of ‘vertical alli-
ances’. Second, it argues that this perspective led many Jews to treat the Declaration
as an unsigned ‘contract’, and it was not until the 1940s, with the rise in popularity of a
discourse concerning Britain’s ‘betrayal’, that this view began to be challenged. Third,
explaining how and why the vertical alliance perspective was pushed to the margins
of Israeli collective memory, the article looks at the rise of the ‘security paradigm’ in
Hebrew literature and examines the ways in which the creation of a Jewish army was
imagined as marking the end of old forms of Jewish politics.
Keywords: Hannah Arendt, Balfour Declaration, British Empire, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,
Hebrew literature, independence, Jewish army, Zionism
The sovereign is the representative of history. He holds the course of

history in his hand like a scepter.
—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Introduction: a dialogue of the deaf?
If history could be defined as that never-ending process whereby people

seek to understand the past and its many meanings, anniversaries and
European Judaism • Volume 52, No. 1, Spring 2019: 67–110
© Leo Baeck College
doi: 10.3167/ej.2019.520112
Arie M. Dubnov • On Vertical Alliances, ‘Perfidious Albion’ and the Security Paradigm
special commemorative events are rare occasions on which academic his-

torians are invited to step out from their dusty, scholarly carrels and share
their findings with the wider public. The recent November 1917/2017
Balfour Declaration centenary is a case in point. Attracting wide atten-
tion in Israel/Palestine, Britain and the US, last autumn’s events provided
numerous reminders of the fact that Lord Balfour’s short letter to Lord
Rothschild, though consisting of no more than sixty-seven words, grew
over the years and turned into a symbol, casting a giant shadow even on
contemporary events. Today’s events also serve as a reminder – grim for
some, evoking nostalgia in others – that the history of the Jewish nation-
state did not start in medias res, in May 1948, with the Israeli Declaration
of Independence, but owes much to the British presence in that specific
corner of the Middle East. Indeed, if there was such a thing as a ‘Palestine
Triangle’ composed of British, Arabs and Jews, as the late Nicholas Bethell
called it, the Balfour Declaration may be regarded as the document that
inaugurated it.1 This triangle, it could be argued, served as an incubator in
which political practices, institutions of self-governance, and paramilitary
organizations that were the nucleus of the future state were developed. At
the same time, more than harmony, coexistence and dialogue, the con-
stant features of this triangle were incompatible aspirations, constantly
rising tensions and, ultimately, a complete collapse of law and order.
Should we regard the Balfour Declaration, therefore, as the launching
pad for the future Jewish state that was established three decades later,
or as the moment of birth of the intractable, yet-to-be-resolved Israeli-
Arab conflict? Historians have offered different answers to this question.
While early studies, beginning with Leonard Stein’s authoritative 1961
account, nodded towards the former and told a sanguine story of struggle
ending happily with triumph, later historians, such as Jonathan Schneer
and James Renton, were far more pessimistic, if not even accusatory,
preferring the latter, dire and grim plotline.2 The dichotomy between the
two narratives is superficial, however. The Balfour Declaration belongs to
both histories. Historical determinism is a vulnerability both histories are
exposed to: the Declaration could be easily located either in a Whiggish
reading of Zionist history, which tells the story of Jewish nationalism as a
linear tale of struggle culminating in statehood and sovereignty, or in an
equally deterministic reading of the conflict, which is too often described
as ‘inevitable’.
Can so much weight be put on the slim shoulders of this notoriously
short letter of 2 November 1917? The short text was neither a blueprint
nor a concrete policy guideline but rather an open-ended text, allowing
multiple readings. The radically different ways in which each side of the
Palestine triangle approached the Declaration, the different connotations
68 European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019

and interpretations of the text, and the way in which different futures
were projected from it, should be taken more seriously. They reveal what
can be described as a precarious ‘dialogue of the deaf’ that characterized
the encounter between British, Zionists and early Palestinian national-
ists. The current article takes these dissimilar, irreconcilable readings as
its starting point. To begin with, for many of its British architects, Lord
Balfour included, the document was best understood through a mix of
colonial adventurism and a quasi-scientific language of trial and exper-
imentation. ‘Our policy may fail’, Balfour admitted in an address to the
House of Lords in 1922:
I do not deny that this is an adventure. Are we never to have adventures?

Are we never to try new experiments? I hope that your lordships will
never sink to that unimaginative depth, and that experiment and adven-
ture will be justified if there is any case or cause for this justification.3
British policy in Palestine, in other words, was not about independent

nation-state building, or even an attempt to come up with a ‘solution’ to
the ‘Jewish Question’. Instead, it was the continuation of nineteenth-
century imperial adventurism by new means, a political experiment.
Falling on an identical language of trial and error, the future historian
Arnold J. Toynbee returned to the subject in 1931:
It [the experiment] is very audacious, and it is obvious that it may be a

disastrous failure. The mixed population which we are artificially creat-
ing in Palestine now may explode, as the mixed populations which had
been deposited by long processes of history have been exploding next
door in Anatolia and Rumelia. On the other hand, if our experiment
succeeds – if we do manage to build up in Palestine a non-national ful-
ly-self-governing State in which there will be national homes for Jews
and for Arabs side by side – then we shall have made a new political
invention which might save the situation in half the world. If that exper-
iment succeeds in Palestine, it might also be made to succeed in India
and in East Africa and in Manchuria.4
The fog of words of 1917 and the early 1920s began to clear, and the
meaning of the ‘political experiment’ was fully stated. The telos of Britain’s
policy in the Middle East was not the creation of a nation-state but a new
entity, the non-national fully self-governing state.
There is a considerable degree of anachronism in any talk of a
Palestinian reaction to the Balfour Declaration. As historian Rashid Khalidi
argued years ago, instead of taking Palestinian identity as given, it would
be more accurate to examine the ways in which the reactions to the
European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019 69

Balfour Declaration accelerated processes of nationalization, and pushed a

significant proportion of Arab inhabitants of Palestine to begin to think of
themselves as Palestinians.5 The Arabic language press in Palestine, a key
organ of nascent Palestinian nationalism, confirms this assertion. Initially,
the Declaration attracted little attention: during the ‘grey zone’ years of
1917–1922, as historian Elizabeth Thompson called them, a time when
prospects of a new Wilsonian world order still fuelled high expectations, it
was unclear what the precise weight of the letter would be, and whether
it would be translated into a concrete political tool. This perspective
changed after 1922, with the invention of a mandate system, and after the
Declaration had been ratified and turned into a legal instrument, included
in the official and internationally endorsed British mandate for Palestine.6
From that stage on, it was difficult for Palestinian Arabs not to read the
Declaration against the backdrop of Great Power imperialism and to
regard it as an official promise made by His Majesty’s Government to the
Jews, making them the sole masters of Palestine. The Jaffa-based newspa-
per Filastin [Palestine], for example, consistently expressed the view that
the Declaration was an imperial wrong and a crude injustice, especially
each year around early November, around the Declaration’s anniversary
day.7 Indeed, ‘Balfour Day’ was often greeted by the Arab sector with
strikes and protest marches. Palestinian nationalists rejected the validity
of the Declaration, and from a very early stage claimed that the British
policy rested on cynical exploitation of local populations and the making
of ‘promises’ that Britain had no intention of fulfilling. November 2nd
thus turned into a contested date, an annual reminder of the disharmony
and asymmetry of life in Palestine.8 In fact, as opposed to the term
‘Declaration’ used by English and Hebrew writers, the Arabic press pre-
ferred the term ‘promise’ (wa’ad, ‫)وعد‬, and some Palestinian writers
referred to it as the ‘Nakba’ (disaster), even before 1948.9
What was the Jewish reading of the Balfour Declaration, if any? It
would be wrong to assume a monolithic, unanimous Jewish response
to the Declaration, of course. Indeed, next to Jews who fêted it, others
regarded it as a reckless political development and became its fiercest
critics. Yet we can talk about a Jewish perspective on the subject, this
article suggests, because a great majority of the Jewish readers of the
Declaration tended to think about it in contractual terms – not so much
as an ‘experiment’ or a ‘promise’, but rather as an informal agreement,
a Brito-Jewish pact or bargain. Jews, in other words, tended to read the
November 1917 Declaration as an informal treaty, inaugurating a new
kind of vertical alliance.
‘Vertical alliances’ is a term most students of Jewish political history
will be familiar with. It was introduced by the late historian Yosef Hayim

Yerushalmi in one of his final lectures in which he famously argued that

from a very early stage of their life in exile, Jews realized that ‘their ulti-
mate safety and welfare could be entrusted neither to the erratic benevo-
lence of their gentile neighbors nor to the caprice of local authorities’, but
to ‘the highest governmental power available’.10 Jews, in other words,
were often seeking to gain direct protection from kings, emperors, popes
and princes, which they found easier than constructing ‘horizontal’ part-
nerships with their immediate neighbours. The origins of Yerushalmi’s
famous thesis, Lois Dubin argued, may be traced back to ideas he adopted
from his own teacher, Salo Wittmayer Baron. Contrary to the view that
Jews were nothing but a defenceless minority group, both Baron and
Yerushalmi asserted that Jewish leaders often rescued their communities
from the fate haunting persecuted minorities by aligning with the strong-
est political authority available, with a strong ruler who could provide
protection and patronage.11 As a survival tactic, forging vertical alliances
proved successful: the Jews received protection, and despite their singular
status were considered a corporative body that integrated naturally into
the complex social structure of pre-modern Europe. Forming such bonds,
we may add, not only provided a substitute to forging ‘horizontal alli-
ances’ with the non-Jewish close neighbours, their immediate surround-
ings, but strengthened the suspicion, if not prejudice, with which Jews
perceived their neighbours as a mob of Jew-hating riffraff.12 Forging ver-
tical alliances, thus, turned into a pattern of Jewish political behaviour, a
basic, almost instinctive modus operandi.
Should we return to Yerushalmi’s thesis in our examination of the
Balfour Declaration? From today’s vantage point, when the popular
historical imagination prefers to see the Declaration as a crucial stage –
if not even the crucial step – leading to the establishment of an inde-
pendent Jewish republic, this perspective is easily lost. Once we read
the Declaration as a first step in the project of building the institutions
of a nation-state that is divorced from the British Empire – that august,
world-spanning institution, which fragmented fast after 1945 until it
finally disappeared into the ether and history books – we tend to down-
play the vertical dimension of the relationship between the tiny Yishuv
(the Jewish population of pre-statehood Palestine, constituting at the
time less than 11 per cent of the general population) and the British nar-
rative. This narrative, popular among those who read Zionism as a ‘rev-
olution’, tends to read Israeli independence as representing a clear break
in modern Jewish history, signifying the end of the age-long tendency to
rely on others and the beginning of a new type of active and self-reliant
Jewish political history. No wonder, then, that those who prefer telling
history from such a vantage point are not quick to acknowledge the fact

that the vaguely worded Declaration of winter 1917 can in fact be easily
read as further evidence supporting Yerushalmi’s thesis.
In what follows, I would like to move in a different direction and
take us back to the vertical alliances thesis. Once we stop reading modern
Jewish political history backwards, from the vantage point of 1948 and
post-Second World War decolonization processes, we can easily see how
the Declaration was, in fact, part of a British imperial story that coincided
with this familiar Jewish political pattern. Often, it was interpreted as an
unsigned contract of sorts between the Zionist movement and Britain,
based on a new vertical alliance that relied on the goodwill of the ever-
expanding Empire.
It is at this point worth recalling that explaining political action is not
sufficient for understanding politics of the past, for a central part of our
mission is to decode political languages, to track the ways in which polit-
ical discourse evolved and changed in each historical period, to under-
stand the vocabulary, metaphors and images of the men and women
of the past. Texts composed between November 1917 and May 1948
reveal a different set of expectations, a different political imagination. To
infer meaning from these, we must take rhetorical devices seriously. For
instance, while Balfour himself was often compared to Cyrus the Great,
the great liberator of Jews from Babylonian captivity, the Declaration
quickly became known as the ‘Jewish Magna Carta’, a moniker used
by Zionist authors more than British ones, a metaphor derived from an
imprecise analogy implying that it constituted a bill of rights granted to
the Jews by a powerful king.13 The importance of such historical expla-
nations lies in the cultural code they contain rather than in the historical
reality they pertain to capture. History creates its allegories, meshing fact
and fiction; our task as historians is not only to tell past deeds, but also to
uncover such historically constituted allegories.
The perception of the Balfour Declaration as an implicit contract or
covenant, I suggest, was not unique to Zionist activists, but makes an
appearance also in the writings of non-Zionist Jewish observers, who
did not necessarily greet the Declaration with joy. In fact, at this point,
even a Zionist like Chaim Weizmann, who lionized the Declaration, and
an anti-Zionist Anglo-Jewish liberal like Edwin Samuel Montagu, who
objected to the idea and considered the Declaration disastrous, have some-
thing in common. When Montagu wrote in his diary that ‘the [British]
Government has dealt an irreparable blow at Jewish Britons, and they
have endeavoured to set up a people which does not exist’, he was dis-
crediting the very idea that there was a Jewish national ‘partner’ to the
deal, and that in order to make any sense the Declaration had to invent
such a nation.14 Similarly, the caricature that appeared in the satirical

Figure 1. Remember this, Rav Yisroel! ‘England: Rav Yisroel, I’m giving you a secure
home, but remember, you will have to move there!’ [in Yiddish] Caricature on the front
page of Der Groyser Kundes (New York: Jewish Pub. and Advertising Co.), Vol. IX., N. 49
(November 30, 1917).
weekly Der Groyser Kundes – a Lower East Side Yiddish version of Charlie
Hebdo, if you like – exposed these doubts (Figure 1). The Declaration was
illustrated as the moment in which ‘Rav Yisrael’ signed an agreement
with Great Britain. It revealed a considerable degree of Jewish anxiety:
Jews, no doubt, were also among those who feared that the terms of the
tacit contract and its far-reaching implications were not clear in the least.
Will the unofficial ‘agreement’ between Great Britain and the Jews entail
an expectation that Jews across the world would displace themselves and
become settlers in Palestine, under the Crown’s protection?
Paying greater attention to these battles of interpretation, coupled
with a story arc that will cease to depict Zionism as a revolution in Jewish
history but return instead to Yerushalmi’s vertical alliances thesis, will
allow us to develop a historical interpretation that renders intact the
link between Jewish history and the chronicles of the British Empire. In

doing so, this article wishes to contribute to a recent, ongoing historio-

graphical effort to reassess the relationship between Jews and colonial-
ism in general, and to narrow the gap separating modern Jewish history
and British imperial history in particular.15 In this line of thinking, the
encounter between Jewish nationalism and British imperialism, which
predates 1917, constitutes a continuation and elaboration of known
patterns of Jewish political behaviour, not a rupture or a meta-histori-
cal revolution. Likewise, this interpretation would allow us to initiate a
critical dialogue with the histories of twentieth-century new imperial-
isms, without which we would be unable to grasp the motives that drove
Balfour and his British compatriots, or the ways in which the contacts
between Britain and Zionism continued long after Balfour’s death (1930)
and even after the establishment of Israel in 1948. In particular, it permits
us to place the Declaration on a different historical trajectory, detailing
a gradual move from the old colonialism to new sophisticated modes of
imperial rule, making increasing use of local agents, requiring a greater
reliance on proxies, and from there to an indirect governing scheme that
may be called, following John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson’s classic
essay, ‘informal imperialism’.16
If contractual, vertical alliances were such a natural mode of politi-
cal behaviour for Jews for centuries, how could Israeli Jews forget this?
How can we explain the fact that post-independence national memory
in Israel erased the imperial support so quickly and diminished, if not
ignored entirely, the vertical alliance with Britain? As a partial, inconclu-
sive answer to this question, I suggest revisiting Hebrew literature of the
1930s and 1940s and the early Israeli literature, in which we can iden-
tify a significant discursive shift. It began when ideas concerning British
‘betrayal’ (‘Perfidious Albion’) began to attract larger audiences, and was
further crystallized by authors of what came to be known as ‘Dor Tashach’
(the 1948 generation) in Hebrew literature, who developed a new set of
literary modes of representation. At this point my argument draws upon
the recent work of literary scholar Uri S. Cohen, who offers a new, excit-
ing chronicle of the formation of early Israeli literature and the forging of
the literary paradigm he refers to as the ‘security paradigm’.17 As Cohen
reminds us, numerous Israeli novelists and poets who fought the 1948
War had their baptism of fire earlier, under the commandership of British
officers such as Orde Wingate or in the Jewish Brigade during the Second
World War. They were also the ones who crafted the representational
norms, literary models, manners of expression and the types of narrative
that paradoxically erased the British dimension from the stories Israelis
tell themselves. The new literature they produced did not hark nostal-
gically on the mandatory triangle of Jews, Arabs and British. Instead,

it was fraught with a sense of British betrayal and switched to binary

models of storytelling – David versus Goliath, a tiny civilization besieged
by barbarism – which is dominant in the way we depict and understand
‘the conflict’ to this day. The blurring of the colonial past became one of
the salient features of this new literary style. The nascent Israeli literature
turned the traumas of the 1948 War into everlasting scars, into a central
component of a new national culture. It provided the new state with its
official narrative, and played a central role in creating the conditions for
this historical amnesia. These modes of storytelling had clear ideological
morals and political implications. They emphasized the need of Israelis to
distrust others and rely on themselves alone, and made it almost impossi-
ble to identify the vertical contacts that the Zionist movement developed
with Britain. Ultimately, this body of literature taught Israelis not only
how to understand war but also how to think about the autonomous
Israeli subject, about their place in the world, and about their place in
pre-independence Zionist history. A selective historical memory, there-
fore, was one of the key features of the ‘security paradigm’ of Israeli liter-
ature. Obfuscating the colonial past went hand in hand with the erasure
of the vertical alliance.
The Whig interpretation of Zionist history
English readers may be familiar with the expression ‘the Whig interpre-
tation of history’. Ever since it was coined by Sir Herbert Butterfield in
1931, it has been used figuratively to refer to the unfortunate tendency of
historians to interpret past events in a linear and inevitable vein, as one
long triumphant march of progress.18 Conventional, textbook histories
of Jewish nationalism often fall into this Whiggish trap.19 An executive
summary of these narratives culminates, it could be said, in a story of
Zionism as a three-step dance: its beginnings lie in the Zionist activities
at the turn of the nineteenth century, reaching a crescendo in the work
of Theodor Herzl at the First Zionist Congress in Basel (1897); it contin-
ues with the vigorous diplomacy of Chaim Weizmann and the Balfour
Declaration (1917); and ends – or is realized – with Ben-Gurion reading
the Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948.
The twin suggestions that there is a straight line that connects late
nineteenth-century Zionist ideas with the independent state that was
established in 1948 and that Lord Balfour’s 1917 letter is a crucial station
on the road ending with the Israeli Declaration of Independence are crucial
components of a powerful fairy tale that we have not yet abandoned. It
is a historical myth, in the very same way that the Whiggish approach

to English history needed to make Magna Carta Libertatum of 1215 the

first domino to fall and begin a chain reaction leading to an increase in
personal rights and freedoms culminating in modern liberalism. Like the
Whiggish view of English history, this too is an anachronistic and deter-
ministic analysis of history. And in both cases, this reading, inaccurate
and false as it may be, constitutes a key component of national history.
According to a popular aphorism (often misattributed to Leo Tolstoy),
all great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey or a
stranger comes to town. That may very well be so. Part of what explains
the attractiveness of the three-step dance plotline has to do with its
pronounced melodramatic impression. Its beginning is almost tragic:
while Herzl critically formulated a plan for action and a political theory
for the Zionist movement, he failed to procure the longed-for ‘charter’
from the nations of the world, which would have allowed the Jews to
establish their state in broad daylight rather than as thieves under cover.
Heartbroken, the frustrated Viennese playwright would die in 1904, more
than a decade before Great Britain was willing to step in and fulfil the task
he assigned her in his script, granting the Jews necessary international
recognition and authorization to colonize Palestine. November 1917 thus
not only marks the dawn of a new age in Zionist history but also offers
a comforting, post mortem happy ending to Herzl’s life. It secures his
position as a mastermind, a genius author of a blueprint that his heirs
followed diligently. Furthermore, attributing the astonishing diplomatic
achievement of the Declaration to Chaim Weizmann created an illusion
of natural descendancy. Downplaying the fact that the Russian-Jewish
chemist from Manchester began his political career as a key member of
the ‘Democratic Fraction’ that challenged Herzl’s methods and ques-
tioned his ultimate vision, the master narrative designated Weizmann as
heir, realizer and executor of the prophecy of the state visionary.
One does not need to accept Hayden White’s harsh verdict, accord-
ing to which one cannot produce historical narratives without surren-
dering to one or another conventional literary schema, to appreciate
the ideological implications of such a master narrative.20 This plotline
generated several by-products. First, it helped to craft a mythical por-
trait of Herzl, the great scriptwriter of the modern Jewish renaissance,
and presents him as a kind of prophet or messiah. Such depictions may
be found, for example, in the works of the Zionist leader and journalist
Nahum Sokolow, the publicist and philosopher Jacob Klatzkin, historian
Alex Bein, Herzl’s first biographer, alongside other stalwart admirers of
Herzl.21 Pathétique narrations used the twin landmarks of 1917 and 1948
to present Herzl as a modern-day Moses, who died in exile and did not
live to see his dream realized. Second, Weizmann was not quick to correct

the impression of those who forgot that he began his career as Herzl’s acid
critic and preferred to see him as Herzl’s natural heir. Since so much of the
legitimacy of Weizmann’s own leadership was anchored in the idea that
the Declaration was made entirely thanks to his ingenious political skills,
he had a strong interest in turning the Declaration into a bigger-than-life,
quasi-miraculous event. The poet Hayim Nahman Bialik, for instance,
was certain that it had been Weizmann who had devised the Declaration,
and gave his own version of the story of Zionism as a three-step dance:
There were two great moments in the history of our rebirth: Hibat Tzion
[the lovers of Zion] – that is the first claim, the first demand inward,
towards the Jews, that they themselves will begin asking for and
demanding the Land of Israel and Zionism; Herzl and the Congress – that
is the claim to the outside world, the demand directed at all of human-
ity to return to us what has been stolen, to give us back the Land of
Israel. These two moments are great, but greater than both is the third
moment – on one side the Balfour Declaration, that is: the acknowl-
edgement of our historical rights and the execution of our demands by
the external world, and on the other hand – the agency, that is: the new
demand made by the Jewish people, the new demand by us, to build the
land and establish the national home. And this third moment is in large
part due to Weizmann, and to him we owe thanks for it!22
Such narrations resemble, and not coincidentally, the romantic tone

of Macaulay, Carlyle and the other masters of Victorian historiography. It
is the historiography of ‘great men’, searching for a single hero, driven by
the optimistic and naïve belief in his ability to shape history, and taking
him to be the engine of historical change. And perhaps it is no coinci-
dence that Carlyle’s famous work ‘Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic’
(1841) – that ‘tract for the times, full of damply explosive moral fervor’,
as Sidney Hook described it years later – was translated into Hebrew in
1919, following the Balfour Declaration by only two years.23 Through
such stories the foundations of a future national pantheon were laid.
Indeed, in the eyes of Weizmann’s followers, it was so important to keep
the flame alight and make sure Weizmann’s name would forever remain
conjoined with the Balfour Declaration that even in 1962, a decade after
Weizmann’s death, vigorous efforts on the parts of Meir Weisgal and
Abba Eban yielded the designation of 2 November as a national day of
remembrance for the first president of Israel.24 This was a late and some-
what artificial attempt to return to a Carlylesque, romantic belief in the
ability of a solitary hero to shape history, coupled with an attempt to
imitate the American ‘Presidents Day’, thereby making Weizmann the
Israeli George Washington.

During the mandatory period, using such ornaments was not con-
sidered odd. After all, Carlyle-like conceptions of history allowed Zionists
to speak of Balfour and British historical personages as instruments of
providence and at the same time create their own new national Olympus
without collapsing into inconsistency. And employing lofty rhetoric
that made Balfour a modern equivalent of Cyrus the Great was savvy
diplomacy – a reminder of early British devotion, disarming critics of
Weizmann’s anglophile line from within the movement, without alien-
ating his British peers. The 1960s homage to Weizmann, conversely, met
with only partial success. Weizmann never achieved a status analogous to
Washington in the Israeli post-independence collective imagination, and
his place in the pantheon, as I shall suggest later, was taken by those fallen
in battle, the Israeli version of the ‘lost generation’, who were famously
dubbed by poet Nathan Alterman – following a speech by Weizmann – as
the carriers of ‘Magash hakesef’ (‘the silver platter’) on which the Jewish
state was given to the nation.25
Third, this narrative helped to shape the Balfour Declaration in the
mind of later Zionist writers as the very colonization charter for which
Herzl yearned in the late 1890s and the early 1900s, despite the fact that
the 1917 letter had very little in common with the type of authorization
documents the British produced in order to enable merchant companies
to trade, settle, form banks and, in some cases, form their own police
forces and quasi-state institutions.26 Crucially, the letter in itself was a
toothless, symbolic gesture, ‘a form without content’ in Weizmann’s
own words, which had no legal standing before it was absorbed into
the League of Nations mandate on Palestine five years later. Presenting
Balfour’s letter as an international imprimatur for Jewish coloniza-
tion in Palestine was possible only thanks to the writ of mandate; it
made little sense before that, and therefore also attracted less attention.
When pushed into a corner, Weizmann pressured those who imposed
a Herzlian reading on him, reminding them scornfully that ‘the crucial
difference between [Herzl’s] charter and the mandate, is that the charter
was never granted while the mandate was’. The Balfour Declaration, he
insisted, had little to do with Herzl’s supercilious, utopian dreams, for
what stood behind it was Britain’s ambitious global strategy: to make
Palestine ‘a link in the great international chain connecting East and
West’.27
Fourth, besides the creation of a Zionist pantheon, the interpretive
move that linked 1897 with 1917 also instigated an ideological and con-
ceptual confusion that would accompany the Zionist movement from
that moment on. Famously, though Herzl’s 1896 booklet Der Judenstaat
(which could be translated either as ‘state of the Jews’ or ‘the Jewish

state’) injected the term ‘state’ into the Zionist lexicon, the authors of the
1897 Basel Programme, also written in German, purposely avoided using
the term Staat (state) and instead preferred using the purposely ambig-
uous term Heimstätte (literally: ‘estate’, or ‘homeland’). The expression
‘a national home for the Jewish people’, which made it into the Balfour
Declaration twenty years later, was not the standard English translation
of Heimstätte but rather a neologism, a new term coined during long weeks
of behind-the-curtains deliberations and stormy debates in the British
wartime Cabinet over almost a dozen drafts of the short letter.28 Both
terms – Heimstätte and ‘Jewish national home’ – were deliberately vague,
allowing multiple interpretations. The insistence of Zionist authors such
as Sokolow and Adolf Böhm on treating the two as synonyms created a
certain degree of uncertainty, if not puzzlement, as to the specific char-
acter of the future Jewish political entity in Palestine.29 As I have argued
elsewhere, up to a very late stage in the game, the Zionists purposely
avoided using terms like state or nation-state and were reluctant to define
their final goal. Twenty years later, David Ben-Gurion associated the
terms ‘national home’ and Heimstätte once again in his testimony before
Lord Peel’s Commission of Inquiry, but emphasized once more the gap
between these terms and the concept of ‘state’:
So we are asked: Why a Jewish national homeland and not a Jewish

state? First of all, I would like to say that in the political program of
our movement, which was first formulated, I emphasize: ‘formulated’
rather than ‘constructed’, since this plan has existed throughout our
history – at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 – even then we
used almost the same words found in the Balfour Declaration: ‘To create
a homeland for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, guaranteed by
state law’. In German, we used the word ‘Heimstätte’, a unique German
word, meaning a home made by public law, that is, meant for the Jewish
people in the Land of Israel.30
An independent nation-state, in other words, was not the agreed-upon

final aim of the movement, not even at the stage in which the British
authorities injected it into circulation, in the context of the Palestine
partition proposal. Such caveats and doubts disappeared in post-1948
Zionist historiography. Privileging a linear reading of history that would
culminate in May 1948, the moment of Jewish sovereignty, it had to
tone down older intra-Zionist debates about the meaning of statehood.
Blurring conceptual distinctions and treating state, national home and
Heimstätte as interchangeable terms was needed if one wanted to con-
struct an illusive tale about ideological coherence and consensus that
characterized the Jewish national movement from its inception. To be

sure, there was nothing unique about this. Teleological narratives that
took moments of independence to be the climactic endpoint of a long
struggle sprang up like mushrooms after the rain in the new states that
were born as a result of post-Second World War decolonization. What
gave the Zionist historiography its unique flavour, however, was the
way in which its narratives were anchored in quasi-mythical ideological
assumptions about the creation of a new type of Jew, radically different in
his mentality and even physique from his co-religionists in the diaspora.31
More crucially, it is a historiography that is predicated on the axiom that
much more than a national movement, Zionism also signifies a return of
Jews into politics, a decisive transformation of the manner in which Jews
deal with power and authority.
Whether written in Israel or outside it, Jewish historiography of
the past decades no longer takes such assumptions for granted. The late
Jonathan Frankel was among the first to boldly challenge this periodi-
zation of rupture, putting his finger instead on the infamous Damascus
Affair of 1840 as signifying a new age of Jewish politics.32 For Frankel,
the mobilization of Jewish leaders such as Moses Montefiore in Britain
and Adolphe Crémieux in France in response to the blood libel accu-
sations against the Jews of Damascus and Rhodes, and the interplay
between philanthropy, lobbying efforts, modern media and transnational
Jewish diaspora networks, provide a multitude of evidence of a shrewd,
sophisticated Jewish understanding of modern European politics and
participation in it. More recently, Abigail Green returned to the affair
and further developed Frankel’s thesis in her studies of Montefiore and
the early nineteenth-century history of human rights. Montefiore’s
involvement in numerous moral crusades on behalf of his oppressed co-
religionists, Green shows, cannot be fully appreciated without taking into
consideration the way in which he was aware of and made savvy use
of a growing influence of Protestant millenarian notions of restoration,
British strategic interests in the Near East, and Lord Palmerston’s belief
in the moral superiority of British imperialism. Montefiore’s ability to
tap into the Victorians’ self-congratulatory view of themselves and the
incipient language of liberal intervention helped him to push the British
government to commit itself formally in the case of international Jewish
relief for the first time, helping to construct what Green describes as ‘a
new political paradigm, in which Jewish activists could situate the cause
of Jewish relief within the wider framework of British (and international)
humanitarian campaigns’. Characteristically, when he was able to attain
from the sultan a promise that Jews would receive the same protection as
all other Ottoman subjects, Montefiore hailed it the ‘Magna Charta [sic]
for Jews in the Turkish Dominions’.33

What is at stake here is not periodization alone or a scholarly quibble

about the precise date of birth of modern Jewish politics, but the under-
standing of the modes of operation and techniques constituting politics.
Ideology put aside, there is much more that connects Montefiore and
Weizmann – two extremely well-connected British patriots and proud
Jews who served as advocates and protectors of their kin – than elements
that separate them. The political achievements of both coincided with
the rise of British imperialism and its increasing involvement in the Near
and Middle East, and both embodied the combination of new modes of
Jewish diplomacy and the old modes of shtadlanut (intercession), which
depended on well-connected, linguistically capable, culturally adept Jews
who had access to the corridors of power.34 Narratives of rupture tend
to produce caricatures of l’Ancien Régime.35 In fact, however, Central and
Western European Jewish politics relied for generations on successful
entrepreneurial intercessors and functional emissaries who could lobby,
intervene and make appeals directly to government officials or adminis-
trators, to revoke or soften hateful decrees, speaking on behalf of Jews in
oppression. It was never a stable structure but an evolving practice that
changed its shape in response to modern technology, the printing press
and new directions in European colonialism. Wartime Zionist diplomacy
would be better understood against this backdrop than as an inauguration
of a form of politics.
Interestingly enough, early, pre-First World War Zionist accounts
did not draw a clear differentiation between modern Zionist ‘diplomacy’
and the traditional methods of shtadlanut or communal leadership, nor
did they seek to explain the Balfour Declaration as an unprecedented
pro-Jewish official pronouncement. Take for example the account offered
by Nahum Sokolow, who was involved in drafting the Declaration and
who authored the first official history of the Zionist movement, pointing
out a similarity between Lord Balfour’s dispatch of 1917 and Napoleon
Bonaparte’s famous proclamation of April 1799. The circumstances in
which both were obtained were indeed analogous: Napoleon’s statement,
issued in the midst of his own campaign for the conquest of Palestine and
Egypt, turns, with a flowery turn of phrase, to the members of the ‘Jewish
Nation’ (la Nation Juive), ‘the legal heirs of Palestine’, and calls upon them
to join the French war effort and realize their right to the land.36 Non-
Jewish British authors, who were accustomed to seeing the French as
the ultimate Other and to considering Napoleon an arch-villain if not
an anti-Christ, had greater difficulties acknowledging the resemblance
between Napoleon’s and Balfour’s declarations.37 Sokolow, however,
was emancipated from the demand to accept such categorical binary
oppositions between the two European nations as given. He considered

the Napoleonic proclamation to constitute a crucial precedent, willing to

recognize the affinity between the French emperor and the British lord.
Later Zionist historians, who considered the antisemitic waves of the
1880s and the rise of Herzl as marking a new dawn in Jewish history, aban-
doned this perspective and rarely mentioned Bonaparte’s Declaration.38
Given the immediate postwar context in which his book was authored,
there is nothing surprising in Sokolow’s reading. As opposed to Weizmann,
who lay all his faith in the British, Sokolow tried to secure the support of
the Pope and develop close relations with the Quai d’Orsay. On 4 June
1917, half a year before the Balfour Declaration, he managed to procure
an official letter from Jules Cambon, head of the political section of the
French foreign ministry, the brother of the French ambassador to Britain
and one of the architects of the Sykes–Picot agreement. The letter stated
that ‘it would be a just and rewarding action to aid, under protection of
the allied powers, the rebirth of the Jewish nationality [in the original
French: ‘la renaissance … de la nationalité juive’] in the land from which the
people of Israel were expelled many hundreds of years ago’, and that the
government of France ‘cannot but feel sympathy for your issue, whose
success is dependent upon the success of the allies’.39
Authoring the first academic study on the Balfour Declaration in 1939,
the Zionist historian Nathan Michael Gelber, who served as an officer in
the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, showed that the
Allies were not the only ones who dropped such hints throughout the
war, telling of a promise dispatched by German representatives to Victor
(Avigdor) Jacobson, the official representative of the Zionist Histadrut in
Constantinople on the eve of the war.40 Published when frictions between
the Zionist leadership and the mandatory government could no longer be
hidden, Gelber’s book showed once more that there was nothing natural
or preordained about the Anglo-Zionist entente. It reminded readers that
figures like Dr Jacobson, who was still an active Zionist during the 1930s,
representing the Jewish Agency in Paris and at the League of Nations in
Geneva, or the late Yechiel (Yefim Vladimirovich) Tschlenow (Chelnov),
the leader of the Russian Zionists on the eve of the war who died shortly
after the issuing of the Balfour Declaration, reasoned that it would be
best for the Zionist movement to remain neutral throughout the war, as
complete identification with one side or the other could have calamitous
results.41
In short, early Zionist narratives made no attempt to portray the
Balfour Declaration as an unprecedented breakthrough, and there was no
attempt to obscure the fact that it was issued under wartime conditions
and that it was, in the reverse of Clausewitz’s famous phrase, the contin-
uation of military efforts by other means. Bonaparte failed miserably in

his attempt to capture Acre in 1799, and unlike the British, the Austro-
Hungarians, Germans and Turks were soundly defeated in 1917–1918.
Thus, these ‘precedential’, non-English declarations were forgotten.
Moreover, for Russian Zionists like Tschlenow, as much as the
Declaration changed the political dynamic in favour of the Zionists, there
was no reason to perceive it as a bold departure from older forms of British
colonial diplomacy. The Declaration, he held, was not an innovation but
rather a continuation of a British political strategy that could be identified
fifteen years earlier, when Joseph Chamberlain presented the tempting
possibility of receiving a charter for settlement in east Africa under British
protection (aka the ‘Uganda Plan’). In Tschlenow’s view, it was the plan
for settlement in east Africa in 1903, and not the declaration of 1917,
that was the real exciting novelty. Exciting, it must be noted, for the
Jews, not for Britain: ‘for England this was nothing big and special, but
rather a new and interesting trial state-wise’, he wrote in his journal of
Chamberlain’s proposal, ‘[yet] it was for us [the Jews] a fact of great mag-
nitude’. Tschlenow had no doubt that the charter system itself – whether
charters Britain granted to private companies in east India, Africa, Guinea
and the Borneo Islands, or charters Germany granted to entrepreneurs
in New Guinea and Africa – was nothing more than a tool to facilitate
colonial expansion. It was a system ‘[that is] adapted to the honest needs
of these states, who are currently more occupied with settling than other
countries, as they strive to ensure their political and economic control
in those virgin lands being annexed by them’. Chamberlain’s precedent
signified to him a colonial power happy to adopt the Jews as patrons to
assist it in the task of expanding to ‘those virgin lands being annexed by
them’.42
This colonial context, so apparent to Tschlenow and others of his gen-
eration, was obscured and effaced after 1948. It was replaced, together
with the understanding of the Balfour Declaration as a tacit contract with
the imperial power, by a new discourse of national liberation and military
self-reliance. It gave rise to a new sense of Israeli subjecthood, divorced
from its colonial breeding grounds. Early signs of the shift, however,
could be identified before 1948, with the rise of a discourse of promise
and betrayal, the language of ‘Perfidious Albion’.
‘Perfidious Albion’
Intra-Zionist rivalries had tinted the way in which the vertical alliance
with Britain had been depicted and comprehended during the manda-
tory period. The Balfour Declaration secured Weizmann’s leadership. As

such, it is hardly surprising that his main political rival, Vladimir (Ze’ev)
Jabotinsky, sought to tell a somewhat different story of the Declaration’s
roots. In his autobiographical works, The Scroll of the Battalion (1929) and
The Story of My Life (1936), Jabotinsky gave credit for the diplomatic success
in the form of the Balfour Declaration to the Jewish battalions in the war,
heralds of the independent Hebrew fighting force.43 Yet it is important to
bear in mind that despite the early disharmony between the Yishuv and
mandate rule, at this stage the writings of Jabotinsky lacked principled
animus towards Britain. Here, too, the Declaration did not emblematize
liberation from Britain but rather a blood pact between two nations striv-
ing for freedom. In the summer of 1923, Jabotinsky penned an angry
rejoinder to those applying the term ‘Perfidious Albion’ to Britain, and
added a jab of his own:
Two legends regarding the ‘English’ abound. Both are tasteless and
each one contradicts the other. One builds upon the common phrase
‘Perfidious Albion’, the other upon the common term ‘Gentleman’.
‘Perfidious Albion’ … who promises under oath and then violates his
oath. This ‘Albion’ never was and is not today. The other legend is
no more logical – the ‘Gentleman’, who is a superman. According to
this explanation, which was popular among us (even the heads of the
movement), this phrase was understood during the ‘Honeymoon’ of
the English-Jewish friendship as the ‘Gentleman’ being a knight, who
wanders across the world with only one goal: to find his moral, political
or monetary debtors, and with no reminder on their part, pay it back in
cash. If the ‘Gentleman’ promised you a few rubles, and you forgot and
moved far away, or just fell asleep – he will go even to the North Pole,
awaken you politely, present himself to you politely, remind you of the
forgotten promise and hand you the money.44
A considerable degree of ambivalence towards Britain was not peculiar

to Jabotinsky. As a glance at the appearance of ‘Perfidious Albion’ in the
Hebrew press tells us, until the outbreak of the Second World War the
phrase was barely seen; the few times it does show up, it has the obverse
sense, such as Jabotinsky lambasting Britain’s detractors.45
An equivocal attitude towards Britain also stands at the heart of
Jabotinsky’s most famous and programmatic treatise, ‘The Iron Wall’
(1923).46 Over the years, Jabotinsky’s piece has been read in the context
of ‘conflict studies’, and contemporary scholars insist on reading it as a
prophetic treatise about a future Jewish self-defence force coupled with a
bold delegitimation of the rival ethnic community and its national aspira-
tions.47 Jabotinsky’s sensational title attracted attention not without reason,
but this popular reading is a product of a decontextualized interpretation,

ignoring the unique dynamics of the Palestine triangle. In fact, the con-
tinuation of British rule in Palestine was an essential condition for the
continued growth of the Yishuv in Jabotinsky’s view. He assigned the
mandate authorities the mission of creating a protective force to act as an
impenetrable barrier, in collaboration with the Jewish forces, having in
mind a force resembling the Jewish battalions in the British army more
than the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), the future army of an independ-
ent Jewish state. Despite Jabotinsky’s attempt to reread the roots of the
Declaration, he continued to view it through a vertical prism, as a pact
between a minority group and the authorities who would afford them
protection. At the same time, in sharp contrast to Weizmann, Jabotinsky
planted the seed that would grow in the 1940s, describing the new
Jewish politics as born ‘in blood and fire’: only with the help of a Hebrew
army could the Jews cultivate a flourishing autonomous community that
enjoys self-rule. Here lies the crux of the paradox that haunts maximal-
ist Zionism: in order to liberate themselves from total reliance on the
foreign ruler, who was willing, at most, to give them an official licence
deigning them ‘tolerated’ subjects, the Jews had to cooperate with the
project of building and expanding the Empire, and to provide Britain with
Jewish Gurkhas unafraid of wielding a dagger. Thus, as I have recently
argued elsewhere, it is hardly surprising that the leaders of the Revisionist
movement enthusiastically adopted the proposal to end the mandate and
turn Palestine into a British dominion whose internal matters would be
handled independently, but which would be sworn to fealty to the Crown
and would stand ready to aid the Empire in campaign and war.48
Contrary to popular perceptions, during the 1920s and 1930s, Zionists
in Palestine were not preoccupied with the image of British foreign policy
as deceptive or inconsistent, but rather with clarifying the precise meaning
of the Balfour Declaration and the League’s mandate. In particular, the
debate centred on the exact signification of the phrase ‘national home for
the Jewish people’ and its political and geographic ramifications – was it
an independent state? A crown colony? Autonomy? And what did the
British mean when they declared that this political entity would be estab-
lished in Palestine? Between the river and the sea? On both banks of the
Jordan River? Such questions underline the difference between formal
agreements between equal parties and the tacit ‘contractual’ arrange-
ments that constituted the vertical alliance between the Zionists and His
Majesty’s representatives. As opposed to a binding legal document, the
agreed-upon term ‘national home’ was ambiguous if not empty, a place
holder. The reliance on linguistic opacity was a smart diplomatic move.
In this way, the authors of the Declaration managed to avoid any kind
of concrete political or geographic content concerning the core concept

of a ‘national home’, but it also tinted the asymmetrical vertical rela-

tionship. Israeli historian Dvorah Barzilay-Yegar has argued that this
semantic flexibility ultimately allowed the British politicians to abate
and dwindle the term, weakening its meaning and significance from
the start, yet without appearing to recant outright on the commitments
made by their government.49 Before accusing the British of not keeping
their promise, Zionists first had to comprehend the precise implication of
that vague promise. Put otherwise, the contestation between represent-
atives of the Yishuv and His Majesty’s government during the first two
decades after the conquest of Palestine took the form of a hermeneutic
struggle – a contest between competing interpretations – regarding the
precise meaning of the text and its political terminology. H.N. Bialik, the
father of modern Hebrew poetry, recognized the dynamic and resorted
to sarcasm, comparing the quasi-legalist debate to futile debates over the
precise meaning of Talmudic terms he remembered from his old days at
the traditional ‘heder’:
Once the English government produced a White Paper, to explain the

Balfour Declaration. And from that day on the government produces
more and more interpretations, again and again. This reminds me of the
days of my youth, when I sat before my rabbi and learned a chapter of
Talmud. There are different kinds of pages in the gemara. There is a page
whose text is greater than its commentary. This kind of page made us
very happy, as when the commentary is short – it is a sign that the text is
simple and comprehensible. But there were pages, whose text was short,
only a number of lines, and the commentary – God help us! weighty,
and surrounding the text like dark clouds. This kind of gemara page filled
the students with terror and dread: clearly, something is not right … the
exaggerated ‘commentary’ of the English government for the short text
of the Balfour Declaration scares many of us, and fills us with fear and
trepidation, lest somehow the commentary eat up the text?! Whereas I
myself never feared the weighty commentary of the Talmud and don’t
fear England’s long commentary…50
The British, in other words, were not accused of betrayal or deceit as

much as they were accused of ubiquitous ‘exaggerated commentary’. The
essayist Ahad Ha’am, who was involved in the debates concerning the
exact wording of the Declaration before November 1917, also jumped in:
no more than four years had passed before he was compelled to divulge
secrets from the editing room, not only in order to reproach the British
for forcing him and his friends to accept a ‘Declaration’ from which was
effaced any hint that the Jews saw themselves as returning to the Land,
to rebuild it (‘the re-establishment of Palestine as the national home’ was

the version that appeared in the draft that Ahad Ha’am was involved in
editing, but the prefix ‘re’ was omitted from the final version), but also to
puncture the inflated Zionist interpretations, which sought to find in the
Declaration justification for the idea that the Land was given only to the
Jews, and ignored the rights of its other residents.51
In light of the above, then, the political wrangling in the early days of
the mandate seems to have been explicitly exegetic in nature, rather than
a subversion of the rules of the game or any attempt to undermine one
particular player. Legal metaphors were abundant, as such squabbling
was likened to a courtroom scene, in which lawyers engage every point,
no matter how minor, to arrive at the precise meaning of a contract on
which their client’s signature rests, without for a moment placing into
question the legality of the contract itself.
Undeniably, despite these interpretative disagreements, and maybe
because of them, the Declaration itself was viewed favourably by the
Yishuv and Balfour’s name was frequently evoked. The founding of
moshav Balfouria in 1922 in the Jezreel Valley (Emek Yizra’el in Hebrew,
Marj Ibn Āmir in Arabic) was one example; the decision to call the Tel Aviv
plaza known to Israelis today as ‘Moughrabi Square’ by the name ‘Bet
[second of] November Square’ is another. November 2nd was christened
‘Balfour Day’ and was considered a secular holiday, an annual reminder of
British benevolence. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the linguist-lexicographer who
is often described as the person who revived Hebrew single-handedly,
went so far as to suggest that a new calendar should be reinstated – a sort
of Zionist tribute to the calendrier républicain of the French Revolution –
that would begin the count of the years from 2 November 1917, the date
of the Declaration. His son, the journalist Itamar Ben-Avi, accepted his
father’s proposal. For both, this day marked the beginning of Jewish inde-
pendent governance, and nothing less. Lord Balfour’s tour of Palestine in
the spring of 1925 was carefully orchestrated as well. The busy itinerary
included numerous visits, festive ceremonies and speeches in Tel Aviv,
Mikveh Israel, Rosh Pinah and Jerusalem, including at the opening cer-
emony of the Hebrew University. Accompanying the aging British lord,
Chaim Weizmann presented Balfour with a gift, an inscribed walking
stick, symbolizing their friendship and, possibly, the Yishuv’s willingness
to help the Empire to make great strides in the future. Enthusiasm took
over even the usually sceptical Hebrew novelist Avigdor Ha’meiri, who
described old Balfour as an emissary of a Great Power. Attuned to the
British language of political experimentation that depicted Balfour as a
scientist professor, however, Ha’meiri allowed some doubts to creep in,
asking rhetorically: ‘does the professor know what would be the fate of
the rabbit he holds in his hands?’52

It was not until the 1940s, in short, that earlier debates concerning
the meaning of the Declaration were abandoned in favour of a new dis-
course of British deceit and dishonesty. Only when the vertical alliance
with Britain was perceived as worthless was lofty rhetoric about Cyrus
the Great and the Magna Carta replaced in Zionist discourse, which
did not invent new modes of representation but fell upon the familiar
trope of England as ‘Perfidious Albion’. From that point on, mention of
the Balfour Declaration held a new ambivalence. Suddenly the opaque
phrasing of the Declaration was seen as a Machiavellian ploy, allow-
ing the British to rescind the Declaration without openly declaring the
annulment.
By this stage, the Arab-Palestinian view of the Balfour Declaration
as a cynical ‘promise’ was already developed. George Antonius’s 1938
book The Arab Awakening played a significant role in this respect, if only
because it brought the Hussein–McMahon correspondence back to atten-
tion. It brought the vexing subject of the place of Palestine in First World
War diplomacy to the centre stage, and presented the Hussein–McMahon
correspondence as a parallel wartime promise, which the British were
willing to utter in order to gain Arab support, but with no real inten-
tions to honour their obligations.53 Twenty years passed, but the stormy
circumstances in which Antonius’s book had been published – at the
time of the Arab revolt of 1936–1939 and the debates over the British
Palestine partition proposal – influenced the way it was received. Here
lies the source of the ‘twice promised land’ thesis, picked up and further
developed in later years by Arnold J. Toynbee and others.54 Britain, up
to its neck in the battle for the Near East, did not do enough to keep its
representatives from scattering ambiguous promises regarding the place-
ment of potential allies in the future postwar expanse, and promised the
same plot of land to two peoples. Hence, placing the Hussein–McMahon
correspondence alongside Balfour’s letter allowed the Arabs of Palestine
to construct their own version of the ‘Perfidious Albion’ story, coupled
with a vehement anti-colonial stance.55
A Zionist narrative of British treachery appeared much later. Much
of it was coloured by the struggle over Jewish immigration into Palestine
after 1939, when strict restrictions were introduced by the British.
Tensions grew after the Holocaust, spearheaded by a new, radical gen-
eration of Revisionist Zionists who did not embrace the old Jabotinskian
ambivalence towards Britain but sought to transform their movement
into an anti-British, anti-colonial liberation group. The first signs of this
radicalization can be found in the writings of the members of the ‘Brit
Habirionim’ – Abba Ahimeir, Uri Zvi Greenberg and Joshua Yeivin –
who voiced their critiques of Britain almost a decade earlier. Ahimeir,

inaugurating the so-called ‘maximalist’ faction, was probably the first

to demand that the Revisionist leadership would declare war against
the British in the early 1930s, following the 1929 riots.56 Greenberg,
for his part, addressed the issue in his poem ‘Emet ahạ t v ̣e-lo shetayim’
(‘One Truth, Not Two’) from 1937. The expressionist poet was unable to
perceive the Balfour Declaration as a sign of ‘the beginning of the deliv-
erance’, since the very notion that the Zionist project must be based on
external recognition was in his eyes a ridiculous one. Vertical alliances,
charters and declarations were meaningless diversions, for in reality, ‘the
homeland is not bought with money’, and ‘only he who follows the
cannon in the fields, / may follow his good plow / on this field that was
conquered’.57
Even more than the writings of the ‘Brit Habirionim’, the forgot-
ten historical poem of Zalman Shneur (Shneur Zalkind), ‘Masa Albion’
(‘Burden of Albion’), catapulted the image of Perfidious Albion from the
political fringes into mainstream discourse. Printed in the summer of 1947
in Ha’doar, a New York-based Hebrew daily – that is, beyond Palestine’s
borders and far from the reach of British censorship – the poem excoriated
Ernest Bevin’s harsh policies and ridiculed the British army’s counterin-
surgency campaign (‘Here they march / the heroes armed with metal /
conquerors of chicken coops / riders of milking cows!’). The English
were characterized by Shneur as a miscellany of ‘robbers and men of
culture’, cold-hearted persons crushing and exploiting the entire world,
and British imperialism was condemned for being corrupt and exploitive
anywhere it reached. Crucial in the context of our current discussion,
this poetry dealt with the ‘vertical alliance’ almost head on. The illusion
of Jewish self-governance, along with protection from Britain, Shneur
argued through his poem, was nothing more than a British plot to create
‘imagined kingdoms’:
To atone the face of the stolen,

you conspired and created, Albion,
crowns of golden fields
with pearls of blown glass;
and hats to the heads of islands,
on the domes of offended nations.
Kings you thus crowned,
offices you thus bestowed;
and you, above them all,
With a powerful scepter you will rule.

Woe on you large children,
imagined kingdoms!

As you take pride,

in the toys of fake rule, –
Albion disgraced
the sources of all your life.58
Zalman Shneur’s poem did not make it into the post-independence Israeli
poetry canon and was almost entirely forgotten. It did leave a lasting
impression at the time on the literary critic Joseph Klausner, who went
as far as holding Zalman Shneur as one of the three tenors of modern
Hebrew poetry, along with Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky.59 Klausner,
the controversial Hebrew University professor, had an enormous influ-
ence on a young generation of Revisionist Zionists, including Benzion
Netanyahu, the late father of the current Israeli Prime Minister. 60 Indeed,
the poetic imagination of the future Israeli Right did not echo only the
poetry of Greenberg, the Israeli Ezra Pound, but also Shneur’s poetry,
which offered a curious mix of lyrical Russian sentimentalism and resil-
ient, bold aesthetics and eloquence that was seen by Klausner as the sine
qua non for the struggle for independence. Years later, echoes of that poetic
enthusiasm found their way into The Gabriel Tirosh Affair (1964), Yitzhak
Shalev’s popular historical novel. The main protagonist of Shalev’s novel
is a German-Jewish gentleman who immigrated to Palestine in the 1930s
and became a high school teacher in Jerusalem. Discovering a hidden
charisma coupled with intense political awareness – not typical quali-
ties of ‘yekke’ teachers – Tirosh decides to challenge the Yishuv’s official
policy of restraint, setting out with his students to fight the British and
the Arabs. In a pivotal scene, the teacher reads to his student-disciples
a different poem by Shneur, as mental preparation for the approaching
battle.61 In a later scene, after one of Tirosh’s students asks him if he thinks
that the British have any intention of honouring the Balfour Declaration,
the teacher is triggered to deliver a harangue in which he castigates the
Declaration and presents the essence of the Perfidious Albion narrative:
Mention of the Balfour Declaration made him twist his lips in disdain.
‘You’re talking about a terminal patient! I hope no one here thinks the
Balfour Declaration was issued out of love for the Bible or the Jewish
people. Lord Balfour was no more in love with us than was the Persian
king Cyrus when he authorized the return to Judea of the exiled Jews
in Babylon. Both had the same motive: the creation of a Jewish pro-
tectorate that would strengthen their hand in this part of the world.
Once the British see that there’s a stronger power in this country than
the Zionists they had thought would serve their interests, they’ll forget
about the Bible and the Balfour Declaration will be a dead letter. Every
day we let go by without hitting back is another shovelful of earth on

its coffin. Do you suppose the British intend to force it on the Arabs at
bayonet point?’62
Through poetry and popular novels, then, this kind of ‘Perfidious

Albion’ narrative became a constitutive element in the construction of
Israel’s postcolonial memory. Furthermore, this accusatory language
migrated into the Zionist mainstream, cementing an anti-British popular
front by the mid 1940s that went beyond the Revisionist and belligerent
right-wing circles. Nathan Alterman’s famous ‘Seventh Column’ poems,
published in the labour Zionist newspaper Davar, provide numerous
examples of this angry betrayal. In 1946, after learning that the British
army in Palestine began using dogs that were previously used in the war
in Europe to search for concealed weapons, he wrote a poem in which the
dog speaks his mind, smelling the scents of an empire in decline, a treach-
erous English nation, and ‘spineless diplomats’ who are seen ‘buying and
selling … the flags we had seen in their blood / with the debt to the fallen
soldiers who died for them’.63 In this postwar context, the British betrayal
was not measured only against Lord Balfour’s ‘promise’ but also against
a breach of debt to the soldiers of the Jewish Brigade who had shed their
blood in the Second World War. The Holocaust, and the analogy that was
often made between Britain’s pre-war appeasement towards Germany
and its postwar Palestine policy, added supplementary dramatic colours
to Alterman’s j’accuse. In January 1947, when it became known that the
Zionist delegation would have a formal status at the London Conference
on Palestine, Alterman made himself the Jewish people’s spokesman,
asking contemptuously if ‘with the end of the murder’ the Jewish people
could be kindly informed as to ‘how exactly it will be thrown to the
dogs’.64
The Bible, the sword, and the making of the Israeli ‘security
paradigm’
The united anti-colonial front of Revisionist and labour Zionists, which

declared an open rebellion against the British and used ‘Perfidious Albion’
as one of its banners, was short-lived. Moreover, despite its wide influ-
ence, the British betrayal narrative did not stand in opposition to the ‘ver-
tical alliance’ thesis. To the contrary, it was grounded in the very notion
that 1917 should be read as the moment in which the Zionist movement
signed an agreement with Britain, which the latter did not uphold. Two
modes of narration that were developed after 1948 offered an alternative
reading of the past, dismissing the vertical alliance dimension. First was

a longue durée historical explanation that strived to identify the religious

and cultural roots of the British view of the Holy Land that predated the
actual conquest of Palestine during the First World War. This historical
reassessment, seldom developed by Israeli authors, detached the Balfour
Declaration from the immediate wartime and political context in which
it was produced. Second, and an altogether different sort of narrative
that sought to dismiss the alliance with Britain, was the one I will refer
to, following Uri S. Cohen, as ‘the security paradigm’ of modern Hebrew
literature.
It is hard to think of a better example of the first longue durée thesis
than the one offered by the Jewish-American historian Barbara W.
Tuchman in her Bible and Sword (1956). Making a daring move for her
time, Tuchman took her readers back in time to the early years of the
seventeenth century, to the King James Bible, which made the Hebrew
Bible accessible and appealing to the dwellers of the isle, to the rise of
Restoration theology, to English Hebraism and to popular conceptions of
the Holy Land in English culture. These, she believed, not only shaped
British national identity in large part, but also annulled the mental dis-
tance between Jerusalem and England’s ‘green and pleasant land’. The
conquest of Palestine and the Balfour Declaration were, in her view,
nothing if not the inevitable crescendo of this prolonged Christian-British
journey. For Tuchman, Empire was not about ‘trade follow[ing] the flag’,
as the famous proverb had it, that is, Empire was not the result of that
close synergy of commerce and colonial expansionism, but instead was
the result of the unique combination of faith and military might, the twin
spiritual and imperial motives.65
In doing this, Tuchman’s narrative extracted the Balfour Declaration
from its position within the chronicles of Jewish history and replanted it
instead in Christian cultural soil. This manoeuvre placed Zionism within a
sequence of actual and metaphorical Christian pilgrimage that perceived
Palestine as the Holy Land, as a cultural, religious and symbolic expanse
many years before geographic and political definitions were applied to
it, and long before the British troops conquered it. Questions concerning
philosemitism versus antisemitism in British culture played no role in
Tuchman’s narrative, nor did she pay much attention to the Orientalist
romanticism that provided a cultural lens on the region for ages. Instead,
she shifted the weight of the historical narrative from the Jewish longing
for a return to ‘Zion’ to the British Protestants who imagined ‘The
Promised Land’.
The genealogy offered by Tuchman has its utility. Narratives such as
these allow one to explain, for instance, why Britain chose to tie its fate
with the Jews of Palestine despite the latter making up a mere 11 per

cent of the population at the time, as well as the continued dedication of

Balfour to the Zionist project, despite his suspicious if not outright hostile
attitude towards other nationalist movements. Yet Tuchman’s book must
be read within its historical context. It was published in 1956, a short
time after the Suez Crisis, which symbolized for many the end of Britain’s
imperial project in the Middle East, and was written by the granddaugh-
ter of Henry Morgenthau Sr, the American ambassador to Constantinople
during the First World War. Tuchman was well acquainted with the view
that her grandfather’s attempt to secure a separate peace agreement with
Turkey during the war failed in large part due to Weizmann’s vigorous
diplomacy on the eve of the Declaration. A few years later, she would
write an essay in memory of her grandfather, telling how in 1917 he
began to sense a growing tension between his liberal worldview and his
initial sympathy for the Zionist project. As an American-Jewish patriot,
fully immersed in non-Jewish society, Morgenthau began distancing
himself from Jewish nationalism. Ultimately, Tuchman’s grandfather’s
criticism of the Declaration – its ambiguity, the manner in which it
aroused the anger of Palestine’s Arab population, the absurdity of the idea
of a Lilliputian, independent Jewish state – led to his increasing alienation
also from the American-Jewish community, and was seemingly the cata-
lyst for his resignation from the board of Stephen Wise’s Free Synagogue
in New York.66
Tuchman herself belonged to a different generation. Like many other
American Jews, her attitude towards the State of Israel was far less critical
and was shaped by the Holocaust and narratives of David versus Goliath
and magical rebirth. Indeed, after 1967, Tuchman’s unequivocal support
of Israel became nothing short of veneration. She distanced herself from
her distinguished grandfather and openly criticized him for his inability
to find a balance that would enable him to hold onto both his liberalism
and his Zionism. These views sneak into the subtexts of Bible and Sword.
Choosing the Balfour Declaration as the ceremonial end for her bestselling
book, Tuchman painted the Anglo-Jews who opposed the Declaration as
‘assimilationists’. Dedicating the book to her parents, Tuchman may have
wanted to hint that unlike their peers in Britain, American Jews were able
to overcome these assimilationist dilemmas. Yet, at the same time, she
implied that the Balfour Declaration did not actually solve anything, offer-
ing as an epigraph to her book a quote from the Peel Commission’s report
(1937): ‘No other problem of our time is so deeply rooted in the past’.
A second mode of narration that sought to blur the Yishuv’s verti-
cal alliance and reliance on the British Empire was developed by early
statehood Israeli poets and novelists. Not surprisingly, Tuchman’s longue
durée thesis did not succeed in providing the early Israelis with a prism

through which they could understand their role in time and space, if only
because it tore history from the hands of the Jews themselves, making
them passive subjects of Britain’s own cultural project. Authors associ-
ated with the groups known as ‘Dor Tashach’ (the 1948 generation) or
‘Dor Ha’medina’ (the state generation), most of whom fought in the 1948
War, sought to narrate instead a plot in which Palestine’s Jews function
as active individuals, shaping the political reality of their lives with their
own hands, through struggle, fire and blood. Taking the armed, existen-
tial struggle as the alpha and omega of the modern Israeli subject, they
bequeathed modern Hebrew literature with narrative structures, modes
of expression, conventional styles of representation, a poetic language
and aesthetic formulas referred to by Cohen as Ha’nosach ha’bitchoni, ‘the
security paradigm’.67 Through the use of literary mediums, the personal
experience of individual authors such as Haim Gouri, Aharon Megged,
Hanoch Bartov, Yeshayahu Koren, Amir Gilboa and others became an
aesthetic plot with national significance. The formative years of the
security paradigm, Cohen contends, were 1937 to 1956, the period in
which the military elite of pre-statehood Palestine became the cultural
and political elite of the new nation-state. It was during these two crucial
decades that these authors produced a series of works that developed
the modes of expression, linguistic forms and lexicon as well as narrative
structures and models of thought that are used to portray war, to think
war. ‘The conflict’ became the constitutive element by which this gen-
eration understood itself, and produced a language for future Israelis to
understand themselves. Subsequently, not only did Israel’s short history
become organized around wars – the ‘steps’ in the development of society
and culture forever pass through the stations of 1948, 1956, 1967 and
1973 – but this is the central axis around which the Israeli literary ‘canon’
formed. Put otherwise, through literature, with its aesthetic and emo-
tional channels of expression, the Israelis learned to describe war and to
think war, and to think of their own location.
More than historiography or political thought, then, Israelis were
exposed through literature to a discursive system of coordinates that
perceived military struggle as a necessary, perpetual reality. What makes
the ‘security paradigm’ germane to our inquiry is not simply its poetic
composition but the way this formula works to blur its own colonial past.
A key feature of the paradigm is to preserve the illusion of independence
from outside powers, the crafting of an image of a sovereign Israeli who
stands on his own. Virile and assertive, the self-determining subject of
early Israeli literature realizes his manhood by living on the sword and
‘on the edge’, tempting death and dismissing, often contemptuously,
outside authority, preferring the small commando unit or the militia over

the large-scale disciplined but bulky army. This aesthetic language went
hand in hand with the small unit (sayeret) ethos that shaped the IDF’s
organizational and military culture, which always preferred recurring
raids, reprisal (tagmul) and minor ‘behind-the-lines’ operations done in
semi-secrecy over mass-scale military confrontations.68 At the level of
politics and diplomacy, this new ethos accords well with Ben-Gurion’s
mantra that the future of Israel rests not in what the nations of the world
say but rather in what the Jews do.69 If in Tuchman’s theological narra-
tive the Bible is what paved the way for the sword, here the tables have
turned, and the sword is what has laid the foundational ground. Direct
military confrontation, violent ‘horizontal’ struggle with the neighbour,
constitutes liberation from the old diaspora politics, from a tradition of
intercession (shtadlanut), which became an object of derision, from diplo-
macy of protections and vertical alliances that relied on the exceptional,
rich or well-connected Jew and the deals he brokered with influential
actors so as to rescue his brethren from malevolent decrees and emplace
them as wards. Political traditions based on the vertical alliance became
a source of dishonour, an expression of subordination. Indeed, such
traditions became the antithesis of ‘political’.
The paradox that stood at the heart of the ‘security paradigm’ was,
of course, the fact that the cycles of violence from which this mode of
expression was born were rooted in a pre-1948 reality of imperial patron-
age and close cooperation between the Jewish Yishuv and the military and
diplomatic representatives of the colonial power. This historic connection
was significant in 1936, when figures such as Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon,
Yaakov Dori and others, who would later become the chief architects of
the IDF, were recruited into the Special Night Squads (SNS), which were
drilled by Orde Charles Wingate, an extroverted Christian mystic and
a special operations commander who did not hesitate to employ ques-
tionable counterinsurgency and commando methods. Nor did imperial
patronage fade away completely in spring 1948, with the Declaration of
Independence. Indeed, a heavy British cloud was still hovering in October
1956, when the Israeli high command, under Dayan, eagerly set out for
a war with Egypt that was intended to be fought side by side with Britain
and France. Was the new, sovereign Israeli shaping his own reality?
Maybe. At the very same time, he was safeguarding Britain’s commer-
cial, strategic and military interests east of the Suez, playing a crucial role
in allowing the former European colonial powers to maintain spheres
of influence in an age in which direct control was neither possible nor
desirable. The manner in which these events were described effectively
by Israelis to Israelis demonstrates Cohen’s argument: a blurring if not
a complete elision of the encounter between the Zionist-Israeli warrior

and the imperial mentor was one of the essential features of the ‘security
paradigm’. Literature did not describe fictitious reality, but it did help to
construct a phantasm of complete self-reliance, providing the best cam-
ouflage for the indirect imperialism of the postcolonial age.
Conclusion: Hannah Arendt reads Kafka
Did 1948 mark the end of a long epoch of vertical alliances? Yes and
no. As historian Michael Brenner reminds us, ‘Israel’s Declaration of
Independence, read aloud and partially drafted by Ben-Gurion, men-
tioned explicitly that the Jews, as a result of finally having their own
state, have become “a nation like any other nation” – but Ben-Gurion
adamantly resisted the notion that the State of Israel would just be “a
state like any other state”’.70 Quite so. Declarations of Independence
are good means of masquerading continuous dependence, imposing an
impression of a break in time concealing dimensions of historical con-
tinuity. At least in one aspect – the way in which institutional violence
is tightly tied to the ‘informal imperialism’ – vertical alliances remained
the name of the game in the postcolonial age. I borrow the term ‘infor-
mal imperialism’ from Gallagher and Robinson’s classic essay from 1953:
alongside formal imperialism manifested through annexation and direct
rule, the two claimed, we can detect from a very early stage the clear ten-
dency of Britain to develop methods of indirect rule that allowed British
traders to preserve their superiority without conquest, annexation or
complete rule.71 The notion of ‘informal imperialism’ allowed Gallagher
and Robinson to tackle G.A. Hobson and V.A. Lenin, who considered
imperialism to represent the highest stages of the development of cap-
italism, and at the same time to uncover the deep roots of the decolo-
nization processes that were unfolding before their eyes.72 At present,
we can expand the term ‘informal imperialism’ beyond the domain of
economic discussion, and connect it to the vertical alliances thesis. The
old imperialism, which disintegrated after 1945, did not herald the end of
economic, military and cultural dependence of the world outside Europe
on the colonial powers of the past.
Taking a cue from Cohen, it seems that more than any other agent,
it was Israeli literature that helped to disguise the new forms of post-in-
dependence alliance and reliance on external powers. It did so when
it began describing the direct struggle with the enemy, and that which
finally provided the tools to convert the ‘vertical’ perspective to ‘horizon-
tal’ contact with the surrounding population. The crux of this narrative is
clear: violence liberates. Without the armour, without self-protection and

a sense of collective security that is not proffered by an external contrac-

tor, Jewish politics remains an empty, meaningless concept. The ability
to die in battle as a Jew fighting for a Jewish cause, accordingly, is what
signifies the departure from the vertical pattern, that which will return
to the Jewish subject the political dimension stolen from him throughout
centuries of exile.
Surprisingly, we find the exact same theoretical and normative for-
mulation of violence-as-politics in Hannah Arendt’s early writings. In
‘Antisemitism’, an extended essay Arendt sketched at some point during
the 1930s, at a stage in her life when she still considered herself a Zionist,
she wrote with contempt of the British-Zionist pact:
With each passing day Zionism is being forced into a vassal relationship
with Britain, a status it must accept to avoid being punished with the loss
of what has already been achieved. This indictment is an old one. Ever
since the Balfour Declaration, Jews have been called the ‘pacemakers
of British imperialism’. Zionism’s response speaks of ‘coordinated inter-
ests’. Things have come to a point where there is no longer any doubt
that Jewish interests are subordinate to those of the British. ‘Without
the Jews there would be no Palestine’, a British politician said recently.
Certainly for England there would be no Palestine without the Jews.
Once again we are the receivers of our emancipation, this time not in
the name of ‘human rights’, but rather as national rights presented to us
as a ‘gift’; and even a ‘Jewish state’ – which we have not dared mention
for decades now, even in our own propaganda, just as in his day
Mendelssohn did not dare in his own name to demand emancipation –
is offered to us as addendum to foreign interests and as part of a foreign
history, that of the British Empire.73
Arendt returned to the subject in November 1941, in an opinion piece

she penned for the German-Jewish magazine Aufbau, titled ‘The Jewish
Army: The Beginning of Jewish Politics?’. The article was published a few
months after she arrived in New York, while Rommel’s Afrika Korps was
breaking the lines of British defence in Egypt, coming nearer than ever to
Palestine’s gates. In the paper, Arendt demanded that the Jews be permit-
ted to form an army to fight Hitler under a Jewish flag. A man attacked
for being a Jew, she famously asserted, cannot protect himself as a Brit
or French, but rather only in the image for which he is attacked.74 The
defence of Palestine, she claimed, is an inalienable part of the battle of
the Jews for freedom – Jews as a nation, seeking to transcend their status
as an ostracized minority. Only through active battle with Hitler could
Jews show the world that the Jewish nation has been reborn, could find
within themselves their survival instinct, which has decayed throughout

hundreds of years of exile and despicable dependence upon the benevo-

lence of others. The war and the Jewish army would prove to Jews and
to others that Jews too are involved in politics. Without a Jewish army,
she finished with a warning, the Jews may find themselves at the end of
the war outside the club of nations.
Less than two years later, in her famous essay on ‘The Crisis of
Zionism’ (1943), Arendt joined the chorus of Weizmann naysayers who
accused him of abstaining from pressuring the British, and of turning the
‘politics of intercession’ into the modus operandi of the Zionist movement.
By this stage Arendt had begun distancing herself from the Zionist move-
ment, but her unyielding position tying together military, politics and
emancipation remained consistent. The crisis of Zionism, she claimed,
stemmed from its inability to bridge the gap between ‘communal leader-
ship’ and ‘political rule’. Oddly enough, she acquired a tone resembling
the Revisionist movement’s maximalists, and judged as subservient the
very notion – held and personified by Weizmann – that the relationship
with Britain was more important than ever during the war, as the tiny
Yishuv could not hope to repel Nazi Germany without imperial assistance.
Arendt went even further: she argued that the Zionist bankruptcy was
almost inevitable, because from its first steps the movement replicated
the vertical alliances pattern, exemplified precisely by Herzl’s charterism
and the Balfour Declaration.75
Arendt’s acquaintance with the vertical alliances thesis is hardly sur-
prising. It was precisely at this time that she began working with Salo W.
Baron, who, we recall, introduced the notion for the first time.76 Arendt,
for her part, added political and normative aspects to Baron’s historical
argument. In her view, a vertical alliance could not serve as an expression
of real politics. For her, it was nothing but a vile pattern of behaviour of
assimilated Jews who preferred to ingratiate themselves with the rulers,
or worse, bow in honour of minor government officials. Her idiosyncratic
1944 interpretation of Kafka’s last novel, The Castle, as a political parable
provided her with another opportunity to develop her thesis. Like K.,
Kafka’s protagonist, ‘the modern would-be assimilationist Jew too’, she
wrote,
is faced with the same alternative, whether to belong ostensibly to the

people, but really to the rulers – as their creature and tool – or utterly
and forever to renounce their protection and seek his fortune with the
masses. ‘Official’ Jewry has preferred always to cling to the rulers, and
its representatives are always only ‘ostensible villagers’.77
In other words, complete reliance of the Zionists on the goodwill of

European powers turned the leaders of the Yishuv into Kafkaesque Ks, in

sharp opposition to the citizens of a free republic. External authorization,

charters or promises granted by other empires cannot make the Jewish
colonists in Palestine ‘free’, just as the arrival of K. in the village relies
wholly on the goodwill and caprice of faceless clerks and absent rulers.
In fact, K. has no official licence to remain in the village. In the eyes of
the minor local administrators, K. owes his existence only to clerical neg-
ligence; while his status as a citizen is written on paper, it has no actual
political meaning, as it is buried beneath constantly growing mountains
of documents. Arendt turned Kafka’s novel into a fable with a poignant
moral. Zionism failed at exactly the point that citizen K., Kafka’s fever-
ish brainchild, did. The Balfour Declaration, according to this reading,
was not the origin of modern Jewish sovereignty but rather the com-
plete opposite, the ultimate expression of the lack of real Jewish political
leadership.
We arrive, then, at a surprising conclusion. Arendt’s political alle-
gory, and with it the aspiration to completely negate the political pattern
of action based on the formation of vertical alliances, accords well with
the line of thought we identify in the authors of the ‘security paradigm’.
These were tales with powerful ramifications. In both cases, organized,
collective violence was perceived as a necessary preliminary step for polit-
ical freedom, and in both cases the existence of a military was seen as the
essential precondition for the making of a republic. Since this ultimately
became the dominant line of postcolonial thought, it is no surprise that
the status of the Balfour Declaration, the greatest promise of them all, has
changed radically. It was not only the Israeli war machine that needed
a new narrative to hide its dependence on outside forces, but the entire
enterprise of trying to revise the meaning of Jewish politics.
Fast forward to 2017–2018, a century after Balfour. At the very
same time that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was greeted
full-heartedly by Theresa May, Britain’s Conservative post-Brexit Prime
Minister, with whom he celebrated the Declaration’s centenary, pro-Is-
rael evangelists in the US shook the dust off some well-travelled, ancient
tropes and began calling President Donald Trump a modern Cyrus.78 They
were soon followed by members of the Mikdash Educational Center, a
Jewish messianic non-governmental organization seeking to prepare
body and soul for the rebuilding of the Jewish holy temple, who minted
commemorative biblical half-shekel coins with the engraving ‘Trump-
Balfour-Cyrus Declaration’.79 Is there nothing new under the sun?
Much is new. Just as imperialism has had a facelift and beat new
paths of action, sovereign Jewish politics succeeded in fusing verti-
cal alliances with new-old agents of power. Indeed, vertical alliance
remains a recurring pattern but it has changed its shape and colour.

After 1956, the annals of the vertical alliance depart from Britain. The
French Fourth Republic, which provided Israel with AMX-13 tanks,
Mirage jet aircrafts and a mysterious facility for ‘nuclear research’ in
the Negev desert, stepped into the breach that opened up with Britain’s
retreat from the region. During the 1960s, and especially after 1973, a
successive line of American administrations took their position. Other
historians have tackled the question of whether the motives for the
French and later the American policies are rooted in post-Holocaust
pro-Jewish sentiments, or in an effective pro-Israel lobby, or whether
they could be explained in the context of the French involvement
in Algiers and its attempt to block pan-Arabism, or in the context of
the Cold War, détente and the wish to check Soviet influence. The
constant adaptation of the vertical alliance to changing circumstances,
the manner in which this tradition of political action succeeded in
acclimating to different forms of political and military realities, is what
matters. Mark Twain’s quip – history does not repeat itself, but it
certainly rhymes – fits well with our thesis. Post-independence Israeli
diplomats and politicians did not need to find their way through the
same uncharted waters as their pre-1948 Zionist predecessors. But the
similarity between Shimon Peres, who developed a close friendship
with key members of the Quai d’Orsay, and Nahum Sokolow, the
lobbyist-diplomat who was sent to Paris to prepare the ground for the
Balfour Declaration, is striking. And just as the phrasing of the Balfour
Declaration was left purposely vague by the British, so did the French
prefer to speak of their support of Israel as an unwritten alliance. As
French ambassador Pierre-Eugène Gilbert has explained, there is no
need for a signed contract between the two countries, ‘just as one can
live with a beloved woman without a marriage covenant’.80 Vertical
alliances, after all, are une affaire personnelle, an intimate matter.
Acknowledgements
Adapted for a British audience, the present article draws on an earlier

Hebrew article published in Theoria u’vikoret [Theory & Criticism] 49
(2017). I would like to thank the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Press and
Hakibbutz Hamuechad Publishing House for their permission to reprint
the article, Sara Tropper for her invaluable assistance in translating it, and
Jonathan Magonet for his comments and suggestions. The research on
which this article is based was funded by research grant number 1012/6
from the Israel Science Foundation.

Arie M. Dubnov is a Research Fellow in the School of History, University

of Haifa, and Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies, George Washington
University.
Notes
The article ‘On Vertical Alliances, “Perfidious Albion” and the Security Paradigm:
Reflections on the Balfour Declaration Centennial and the Winding Road to Israeli
Independence’ was first published in Hebrew in Theory and Criticism, vol. 49, winter
2017, pp. 177–207. Publisher: Van Leer Institute Press and Hakibbutz Hameuchad
Publishing House.
1. Nicholas William Bethell, The Palestine Triangle: The Struggle for the Holy Land,
1935–48 (New York: Putnam, 1979).
2. Leonard J. Stein, The Balfour Declaration (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1961); James Renton, The Zionist Masquerade: The Birth of the Anglo-Zionist
Alliance 1914–1918 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Jonathan
Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London:
Bloomsbury, 2010).
3. Quoted in Christopher Sykes, Crossroads to Israel (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1973), 7.
4. Arnold J. Toynbee, ‘The Present Situation in Palestine’, International
Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1931–1939) 10, no. 1 (1931), 38–68,
here 49.
5. Rashid Khalidi, ‘The Formation of Palestinian Identity: The Critical Years,
1917–1923’, in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, ed. Israel
Gershoni and James Jankowski (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997),
171–190.
6. Elizabeth F. Thompson, Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional
Government in the Middle East (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013),
131–132.
7. See in particular Filastin, 3 November 1922; 3 November 1923; 2 November
1929; 3 November 1946. For discussion, see Mustafa Kabaha, Ìtonut Be-Èn
Ha-SeÀrah: Ha-Ìtonut Ha-Palestinit Ke-Makhshir Le-Ìtsuv Daàt Kahal 1929-
1939 [The Press in the Eye of the Storm: The Palestinian Press Shapes Public
Opinion 1929–1939] (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi & The Open University of
Israel, 2004); and Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian
Struggle for Statehood (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006), 90–104.
8. Elie Podeh, ‘Diversity within a Show of Unity: Commemorating the
Balfour Declaration in Israel (1917–2017)’, Israel Studies 22, no. 3 (2017),
1–30.
9. Eli Osheroff, ‘On the Corner of Balfour and Ahad-Ha’am: Zionism, Nationality
and Imperialism in Early Palestinian Thought’, Theory & Criticism 49 (2017),
209–232 [Hebrew]; Nadera A. Mansour, ‘Balfour’s Promise: Arab Identity

and Temporality in Arabic Interpretations of the Balfour Declaration’, paper

presented at the conference ‘The Balfour Declaration: One Hundred Years in
History and Memory’, Princeton, NJ (9 May 2017).
10. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Servants of Kings and Not Servants of Servants: Some
Aspects of the Political History of the Jews (Atlanta, GA: Tam Institute for Jewish
Studies, Emory University, 2005), 7.
11. Lois C. Dubin, ‘Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, the Royal Alliance, and Jewish
Political Theory’, Jewish History 28 (2014), 51–81.
12. Salo Baron held that an awareness of such a pattern would prove the fallacy
of what he famously and derisively referred to as the ‘lachrymose concep-
tion of Jewish history’, depicting the history of Jews in the diaspora as a
never-ending procession of hateful decrees, pogroms and persecution. Such
a notion turned out to be an abiding one, attracting the attention of many
of Yerushalmi’s students who further developed it in years to come. In this
way, Baron’s mode of reading Jewish history turned out to be offering a
diasporic answer to the Zionist interpretation of history, traditionally asso-
ciated with the ‘Jerusalem school’ that could not distinguish diaspora from
exile and identified both with suffering and destruction. It is noteworthy
that Yerushalmi went one crucial step further than his mentor: he suggested
that the enthusiastic adoption of the idea of the nation-state by Jews did
not signify a change of course; rather, it elaborated this existing histori-
cal model. For discussion, see Dubin, ‘Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’, and David
Engel, ‘Crisis and Lachrymosity: On Salo Baron, Neobaronianism, and the
Study of Modern European Jewish History’, Jewish History 20, no. 3 (2006),
243–264.
13. For example Chaim Weizmann, The Jewish People and Palestine: Statement
Made before the Palestine Royal Commission in Jerusalem, on November 25th, 1936
(Jerusalem: Zionist Organization and Keren Hayesod, 1937), 18; idem,
‘Message from Dr. Chaim Weizmann’, The New Palestine (1942), 16–17; David
Ben-Gurion, ‘Iyunim ba-Tanakh [Biblical Reflections], 2nd ed. (Tel Aviv: ‘Am
Oved, 1976), 12. Some of these literary-historical tropes are analysed in
Yaacov Shavit and Barbara Harshav, ‘Cyrus King of Persia and the Return
to Zion: A Case of Neglected Memory’, History and Memory 2, no. 1 (1990),
51–83; and, more recently, Derek J. Penslar, ‘Declarations of (in)Dependence:
Tensions within Zionist Statecraft, 1896–1948’, Journal of Levantine Studies 8,
no. 1 (2018), 13–34.
14. Edwin Montagu, ‘India Diary, 1917–1918’, Montagu Papers, Trinity College
Library, Cambridge, as quoted in Maryanne A. Rhett, The Global History of the
Balfour Declaration: Declared Nation (London: Routledge, 2016), 1.
15. Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel (eds), Colonialism and
the Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); Abigail Green, ‘The
British Empire and the Jews: An Imperialism of Human Rights?’ Past & Present
199, no. 1 (2008), 175–205.
16. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, The
Economic History Review 6, no. 1 (1953), 1–15.

17. Uri S. Cohen, Ha’nosach ha’bitchoni ve’tarbut hamilchama ha’ivrit [The Security
Paradigm and the Culture of the Hebrew War] (Jerusalem: The Bialik
Institute, 2017).
18. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and
Sons, 1931).
19. Interestingly enough, such ‘Whiggish’ assumptions were conveyed through
the subtitle ‘masad le’medinat Israel’ [‘a foundation for the State of Israel’],
which did not appear in the original English version of Leonard Stein’s classic
book on the Declaration, but was added by the Hebrew translator to the
edition published in Israel in 1962.
20. Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
21. See Jacob Klatzkin, Ketavim [Writings] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Press, 1953),
21–22, 283–284 and passim; Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism, 1600–1918, 2
vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1919); Alex Bein, Theodore Herzl: A
Biography, trans. Maurice Samuel (New York: Atheneum, 1970). Bein’s book
was originally published in German in 1941. Bein later became director of the
Central Zionist Archives and Israel’s first State Archivist. For an examination
of the ways in which Herzl’s image has been reconstructed in the Zionist
and Israeli collective memory, see Daniel Gutwein, ‘ha-havnaya ha-ḥozeret
shel Herzl ba-zikaron ha-kibutzi be-Yisrael: miradikalizm me-‘azev le-shuliyut
mistagelet’ [The Reconstruction of Herzl’s Image in Israel. Collective Memory:
From Formative Radicalism to an Adapting Fringe], Iyunim Bitkumat Israel 12
(2002), 29–73.
22. Haim Nahman Bialik, ‘Eretz Israel’, in Devarim she-baʻal-peh [Oral History] (Tel
Aviv: Dvir, 1935), 153–154.
23. Sidney Hook, The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility (London:
Secker & Warburg, 1945), 14. The Hebrew translation was prepared by Isser
Joseph Einhorn (1866–1925) and published in Warsaw: Thomas Carlyle, ‘Al
giborim, ʻavodat giborim, u-midat ha-gevurah be-divre ha-yamim: shishah shiʻuirm
[On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History] (Warsaw: Steibel,
1919).
24. Meir Weisgal to Moshe Shertok, 15 April 1954, as well as Abba Eban to Vera
Weizmann, 2 November 1962, the Weizmann Archives, Rehovot.
25. Alterman’s poem first appeared in the newspaper Davar, as part of his famous
‘Seventh Column’ on 19 December 1947, a few weeks after the beginning of
the battles of the 1948 War. In the motto to his poem, Alterman quoted (or
rather paraphrased) Weizmann, who arguably used the phrase ‘a state will
not be handed over to the Jewish people on a silver platter’ in a speech made
shortly after the UN decision to partition Palestine.
26. Some suggested that the charter of the British South Africa Company, which
allowed the company to own land, establish banks and run its own police
force, was one of the model charters Herzl had in mind. For a discussion of the
drafts of the charter drawn up by Herzl (and their surprising disregard for later
Zionist historiography), see Derek J. Penslar, ‘Herzl and the Palestinian Arabs:

Myth and Counter-Myth’, Journal of Israeli History 24, no. 1 (2005), 65–77. For
a brilliant analysis of the way in which the East India Company took the form
of state and sovereign, blurring the distinction between ‘commercial’ and
‘imperial’ forms of governance, see Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate
Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
27. Chaim Weizmann, Devarim: Neumim, Maamarim U-Mikhtavim Be-ArbaÀh
Kerakhim [Hebrew], 4 vols (Tel Aviv: Mitspah, 1936), vol. 2, 249–251 (trans-
lation mine [AD]).
28. The earliest draft being the Conjoint Foreign Committee’s suggestion written
by Lucien Wolf in early March 1916. The term ‘national home’ makes its
appearance only in drafts from July–August 1917 onwards, and might very
well be the brainchild of Nahum Sokolow. See War Cabinet minutes, ‘Cabinet
24/24, G. T. 1803: The Zionist Movement, August, 1917’, British National
Archives (formerly Public Records Office), London; as well as Stein, The
Balfour Declaration, 468; and 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, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), 558. The key debates were
revisited by Renton, The Zionist Masquerade and Rhett, The Global History of the
Balfour Declaration.
29. Sokolow, History of Zionism; Adolf Böhm, Die Zionistische Bewegung, 2 vols
(Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1935).
30. David Ben-Gurion, Ba-MaÀrakhah [In the Battle], ed. Yehudah Erez, 3rd ed.,
5 vols (Tel Aviv: Workers Party of Eretz Israel, 1950), vol. I, 106. Israeli histo-
rian Dmitry Shumsky further develops this point in his recent studies, calling
into question the conventional reading of Zionist ideology as predicated on
the idea of the nation-state. See Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-State: The
Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2018).
31. A topic explored in numerous previous studies, two mini-classic exam-
ples being Arnold M. Eisen, Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness
and Homecoming (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); and Anita
Shapira, Yehudim Ḥadashim, Yehudim Yeshanim [New Jews, Old Jews] (Tel
Aviv: Am Oved, 1997).
32. Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: ‘Ritual Murder’, Politics, and the Jews in
1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
33. Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 140, 150–151.
34. At this point I follow Israel Bartal, ‘Moses Montefiore: Nationalist Before His
Time, or Belated Shtadlan?’, Studies in Zionism 11, no. 2 (1990), 111–125.
35. Far worse, the shtadlan is often coupled with the Hofjude (court Jew), though
they functioned differently, in different geographies and at different times.
Notoriously, antisemitic propaganda was successful in instituting the deroga-
tory image of the court Jew as a conniving, power-craving, greedy social
climber. It is beyond the scope of the current article to develop this distinction.

Noteworthy, however, is the way in which the derogatory image of the court
Jew made its way into Part I of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1951), which we will return to at a later
stage of our discussion.
36. Sokolow, History of Zionism, 87–88. Napoleon’s 1799 proclamation is examined
in detail in Franz Kobler, Napoleon and the Jews (New York: Schocken Books,
1976) and Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France,
1715–1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
37. As demonstrated exceptionally well in Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
38. Despite its programmatic introduction, positioning the history of France’s
Jews in the larger story of Jewish modernity up to the rise of Zionism, Arthur
Hertzberg’s The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1968) makes no reference to the 1799 proclamation. Alex
Bein returned to the subject years later, but attempted to downplay the sim-
ilarity between the two declarations, in his imperious The Jewish Question:
Biography of a World Problem, trans. Harry Zohn (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1990), 577. (The book was originally published
in German in 1980.)
39. For a discussion, see Edy Kaufman, ‘The French Pro-Zionist Declarations of
1917–1918’, Middle Eastern Studies 15, no. 3 (1979), 374–407. A Hebrew trans-
lation of the letter was included in Florian Sokolow, Avi: Naḥum Soḳolov [My
Father, Nahum Sokolow] (Jerusalem: Sifriyah ha-Tsiyonit, 1970), 145. The
French original is preserved with the Nahum Sokolow Papers, Central Zionist
Archives, A 18/24/23.
40. N.M. (Nathan Michael) Gelber, Hatsíharat Balfur ve-toldoteha [The Balfour
Declaration and Its History] (Jerusalem: ha-Hanhalah ha-Tsiyonit, 1939).
The possible ‘German Declaration’ was re-examined years later in Isaiah
Friedman, Germany, Turkey, and Zionism 1897–1918, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998). Friedman first published his book in 1977.
41. A point Gelber reiterated many years later in an article written in Tschlenow’s
memory: Nathan Michael Gelber, ‘Doktor Yechiel Chlenov – ‘im ha’ala’t
arono’, Davar (15 January 1961), 2. For further information, see the posthu-
mously published collection of his writings, Jechiel Tschlenow, Pirkei hayav
u-fe’ulato [His Life and Work] (Tel Aviv: Hotz’at Eretz Yisrael, 1937).
42. Tschlenow, Pirkei hayav u-fe’ulato, 192.
43. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, ‘Megilat ha-Gedud [The Scroll of the Battalion],
trans. Abba Ahimeir (Jerusalem: HaSolel, 1929); idem, ‘Sipur yamai’
[The Story of My Life], in Jabotinsky, Ketavim, ed. Eri Jabotinsky, vol. 1,
Avṭobiyografiyah (Jerusalem: Eri Jabotinsky, 1947) [orig. 1936]. Jabotinsky’s
self-fashioning was discussed in Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de
Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001), chapters 6–9, and re-examined more
recently in Brian Horowitz, ‘Introduction: Muse and Muscle: Story of My
Life and the Invention of Vladimir Jabotinsky’, in Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Story

of My Life, ed. Brian Horowitz and Leonid Katsis (Detroit, MI: Wayne State
University Press, 2015), 1–32.
44. Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Laḥaṣ’ [Pressure], in ha-Derekh el ha-revizyonizm ha-Tsi-
yoni: kovets maamarim be-’Razsvyet’ la-shanim 1923–1924 [The Road to Zionist
Revisionism], ed. Joseph Nedava (Tel Aviv: Mekhon Z’abotinski be-Yisrael,
1984), 64–75, here 73. The article was originally written in Berlin, August
1923.
45. One of the only references I was able to track down is a Hebrew review of a
book by the French journalist Geneviève Tabouis, which appeared (without
authorial attribution) in the General Zionist daily Ha-boker: ‘Often, the flex-
ibility of thought and the tremendous autonomy enjoyed by parts of the
complex machine that is the British government’, the writer explained, ‘leads
people to erroneously mark the English as scoundrels’. ‘Who better than we
here in Palestine know these things’, he added. ‘Albion ha-nokhel’ [Perfidious
Albion], Ha-boker (5 May 1939), 7. The phrase can be traced, of course, to
English–French relations, and its use by the Yishuv might be considered indic-
ative of an exaggerated sense of self-importance: a handful of Jews comparing
themselves to France.
46. Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs)’, in Israel in the Middle
East: Documents and Readings on Society, Politics, and Foreign Relations, Pre-1948 to
the Present, edited by Itamar Rabinovich and Jehuda Reinharz (Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England, 2007), pp. 41–43. The essay was written
originally in Russian under the title ‘O zheleznoi stene (My i araby)’. It was
published on 4 November 1923 (that is two days after the fifth ‘Balfour anni-
versary’) in Razsvet (literally ‘Dawn’), a journal that took its title from the
famous Odessa-based Russian-Jewish periodical, which became the organ of
the Revisionist Zionist movement, published in Berlin and Paris.
47. Avi Shlaim, Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London: Allen Lane, 2000);
Kirsten E. Schulze, The Arab-Israeli Conflict (London: Routledge, 2017), 5; Uriel
Abulof, ‘National Ethics in Ethnic Conflicts: The Zionist “Iron Wall” and the
“Arab Question”’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 37, no. 14 (2014), 2653–2669.
48. Arie Dubnov, ‘‘Ha-medinah she-ba-derekh’ o ha-imperiah makeh shainit?:
impairi’alizem federativi ve-le’umiut yihudit be-ikbot milḥemet ha-olam
ha-rishonah’ [A ‘State-in-the-Making’ or the Empire Strikes Back?
Imperialism and Jewish Nationalism following the First World War], Israel
24 (2016), 5–36; Arie Dubnov and Hanan Harif, ‘Zionism: Roads Not Taken
on the Journey to the Jewish State’, Ma’arav (29 April 2012), http://www.
maarav.org.il/english/2012/04/zionisms-roads-not-taken-on-the-journey-to-
the-jewish-state-arie-dubnov-hanan-harif/ (accessed 18 February 2018).
49. Dvorah Barzilay-Yegar, Bayit leʼumi la-ʻam ha-Yehudi: ha-muśag ba-ḥashivah
uva-ʻaśiyah ha-medinit ha-Briṭit, 1917–1923 [A National Home for the Jewish
People: The Concept in British Political Thinking and Policy Making 1917–
1923] (Jerusalem: Hasifriya Hazionit, 2003).
50. Hayyim Nahman Bialik, ‘Land of Israel’, in Devarim she-baàl-peh [Speeches]
(Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1935), 153–156, here 156.

51. Ahad Ha’am, ‘Hakdama’ [Preface], in ʻAl parashat derakhim: ḳovets maʼamarim
[At the Crossroads: Collected Essays], 4 vols (Berlin: Yudisher Ferlag, 1921),
vol. 1, xviii–xxiv. The new preface was written in London in May 1920,
shortly after the Nebi-Mussa riots. Moshe Glickson, editor of the daily Haaretz
and Ahad Ha’am’s first biographer, also paid attention to the subject, contrast-
ing original intentions and post-publication interpretations of the Declaration.
The new preface was written by Ahad Ha’am, Glickson argued, as a ‘moderate
and sober assessment … warning against excesses and exaggerations that had
no real basis either in the Balfour Declaration itself or in the conditions of
reality’. Moshe Glickson, Ahad Ha-Àm: hayav u-foòlo [Ahad Ha’am: His Life
and Work] (Jerusalem: Dfus Haaretz, 1927), 154.
52. Avigdor Hame’iri, ‘Balfour’, Hayeshuv 25 (1925), 8–9, here 8.
53. Though parts of the correspondence began to appear in the English and Arabic
press earlier, the fact that it was included as an appendix to Antonius’s book
turned the historical essay into a first-rate political text: George Antonius, The
Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (New York: Capricorn
Books, 1965) [orig. 1938]. For a discussion, see Albert Habib Hourani, ‘The
Arab Awakening Forty Years After’, in The Emergence of the Modern Middle
East (Oxford: Macmillan Press, 1981), 193–215; and also Karin Loevy,
‘Reinventing a Region (1915–22): Visions of the Middle East in Legal and
Diplomatic Texts Leading to the Palestine Mandate’, Israel Law Review 49, no.
3 (2016), 309–337. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of
Antonius’s book. The publication heralded the birth of a new historiography,
prompting Palestinian liberals, most notably Albert Hourani, to turn to the
study of Middle East history. For a discussion, see Jens Hanssen and Max
Weiss (eds), Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History
of the Nahda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
54. Arnold J. Toynbee and Isaiah Friedman, ‘The McMahon-Hussein
Correspondence: Comments and a Reply’, Journal of Contemporary History
5, no. 4 (1970), 185–201. For details of the debate, see Isaiah Friedman,
Palestine, a Twice-Promised Land? (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
2000). The old tropes resurfaced in the recent controversies surrounding the
Declaration’s centenary. See, for example, Ilan Pappe, ‘“Perfidious Albion”:
The British Legacy in Palestine’, The Balfour Project, 19 August 2014, http://
www.balfourproject.org/perfidious-albion-the-british-legacy-in-palestine/
(accessed 8 March 2018); and Peter A. Shambrook, ‘Contradictory Promises’,
The Balfour Project, 23 August 2014, http://www.balfourproject.org/contra-
dictory-promises/ (accessed 8 March 2018).
55. It was also at this time that the Machiavellian image of British foreign poli-
cy-makers began to develop and with it the connection between the conflict
in Palestine and areas of strife in other parts of the Empire. It was no coin-
cidence that the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw chose to direct his
barbed arrows at the elderly Balfour during roughly the same period in which
Antonius’s book was published. Shaw’s venomous short play, ‘Arthur and the
Acetone’, identifies the Yishuv as a sort of Middle Eastern Ulster.

56. Colin Shindler, The Rise of the Israeli Right: From Odessa to Hebron (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), chapters 5–6; Peter Bergamin, An
Intellectual Biography of Abba Ahimeir, unpublished PhD diss., University of
Oxford, 2016.
57. Uri Zvi Greenberg, ‘Emet aḥat ṿe-lo shetayim’ [One Truth, Not Two], in Sefer
ha-ḳiṭrug ṿeha-emunah [The Book of Denunciation and Faith] (Yerushalayim:
Bet ha-sefarim ha-leumi veha-universitai, 1937), 179–180.
58. Zalman Shneur, ‘Masa Albion’ [Albion Burden], in Kol Kitve Zalman Shneur
[The Complete Writings of Zalman Shneur] (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1953), vol. 3,
97–121. Although the poem was published in the Jubilee edition of HaDoar
only in August 1947, the date on the manuscript of the poem preserved in
the National Library (the Abraham Schwadron Collection) and the version
included in the later edition of all his writings is ‘Menachem-Av 1946’,
almost a year earlier, in the summer of 1946. The reason for the discrepancy
is unclear. The delay may have stemmed from Shneur or his editors’ fear
of publishing a poem of explicit reproach against the British, and this fear
had dissipated a year later. Alternatively, it is possible that Shneur sought to
present a false representation and to create the illusion that the poem was
written before the summer of 1947, as a sort of prophecy that proved to be
correct. These questions require further clarification.
59. Joseph Klausner, Z. Shneʼur: Ha-Meshorer Ṿeha-Mesaper [Z. Shneur: The Poet
and Author] (Tel Aviv: Yavneh, 1947).
60. Adi Armon, ‘Idan Netanyahu: Benzion Netanyahu [The Age of Netanyahu:
Ben Zion Netanyahu]’, Molad: The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy,
17 August 2016 (retrieved 5 February 2019 from http://www.molad.
org/images/upload/files/netanyahu.pdf). An abbreviated version of
the article appeared in English under the title ‘How Netanyahu’s
Father Adopted the View of Arabs as Savages’, Haaretz, 5 July 2018
(retrieved 5 February 2019 from https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/
when-netanyahu-s-father-adopted-the-view-of-arabs-as-savages-1.6244840).
61. Yitzhak Shalev, Parashat Gavriʼel Tirosh [The Gabriel Tirosh Affair] (Tel Aviv:
ʻAm ʻOved, 1964), 84–87.
62. Shalev, Parashat Gavriʼel Tirosh, 136. I would like to thank Hillel Halkin for
allowing me to cite from his unpublished translation of Shalev’s work.
63. Nathan Alterman, Ha-tur ha-shvi’i [The Seventh Column] (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz
hame’uhad, 1977), vol. 1, 62.
64. Ibid., 75–76.
65. Barbara Wertheim Tuchman, Bible and Sword (New York: New York University
Press, 1956).
66. Barbara Wertheim Tuchman, ‘The Assimilationist Dilemma: Ambassador
Morgenthau’s Story’, in Practicing History: Selected Essays (New York: Knopf,
1981), 208–217.
67. Cohen, Ha’nosach ha’bitchoni.
68. For a brilliant analysis, see Gil-li Vardi, ‘“Pounding Their Feet”: Israeli Military
Culture as Reflected in Early IDF Combat History’, Journal of Strategic Studies

31, no. 2 (2008), 295–324. Compelling arguments regarding the decline of

the ‘Sayeret ethos’ in post-1973 Israel are presented in Yagil Levy, Edna
Lomsky-Feder, and Noa Harel, ‘From “Obligatory Militarism” to “Contractual
Militarism”: Competing Models of Citizenship’, in Militarism and Israeli Society,
ed. Gabriel Sheffer and Oren Barak (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2010), 145–167.
69. Quoted in Mordechai Bar-On, Mi-kol mamlakhot ha-goyim: yaḥase Yiśraʼel
u-Briṭanyah ha-gedolah ba-ʻaśor ha-rishon le-aḥar tom teḳufat ha-Mandaṭ 1948–
1959 [Of All the Kingdoms: Israel’s Relations with the United Kingdom during
the First Decade after the End of the British mandate in Palestine 1948–1958]
(Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Tzvi, 2006), 173.
70. Michael Brenner, In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2018), 139–140.
71. Gallagher and Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’.
72. For a discussion and assessment, see William R. Louis (ed.), Imperialism:
The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976);
Patrick Wolfe, ‘History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to
Postcolonialism’, The American Historical Review 102, no. 2 (1997), 388–420.
73. Hannah Arendt, ‘Antisemitism’, trans. John E. Woods, in The Jewish Writings,
ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007),
46–123, here 58. The essay was unpublished prior to 2007.
74. Hannah Arendt, ‘The Jewish Army: The Beginning of Jewish Politics?’
(1941), in Kohn and Feldman, The Jewish Writings, 136–142, here 137.
Curiously, Arendt’s article was not included in the Hebrew translation of
her Jewish writings, perhaps because it did not fit her popular image as
prophet of post-Zionism. Aufbau was published in German, edited and read
by Jewish immigrants from Austria and Germany; see Benjamin Lapp, ‘The
Aufbau Newspaper, Its Evolving Politics and the Problem of German-Jewish
Identity, 1939–1955’, The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 58, no. 1 (2013),
161–174.
75. Hannah Arendt, ‘The Crisis of Zionism’ (1943), in Kohn and Feldman, The
Jewish Writings, 329–337. See also Hannah Arendt, ‘Single Track to Zion’
[Review of Chaim Weizmann’s autobiography, Trial and Error], Saturday
Review of Literature 32 (5 February 1949), 22–23.
76. A relationship examined in Gil Rubin, ‘Hannah Arendt and Salo Baron: An
Intellectual Friendship’, Naharaim – Zeitschrift für deutsch-jüdische Literatur und
Kulturgeschichte 9, nos. 1–2 (2015), 73–88.
77. Hannah Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, Jewish Social Studies
6, no. 2 (1944), 99–122, here 116.
78. For example Lance Wallnau, God’s Chaos Candidate: Donald J. Trump and the
American Unraveling (Keller, TX: Killer Sheep Media, Inc., 2016), 29–33, 65
and passim. I would like to thank Samuel Goldman for bringing the American
uses of the Cyrus trope to my attention. For additional examples, see Samuel
Goldman, ‘With the Embassy Move to Jerusalem, a Biblical Trump?’, The New
York Times (8 March 2018).

79. Available for purchase for US$50 at http://en.hamikdash.org.il/about/

we-need-your-support/the-temple-coin/.
80. Quoted in Robert B. Isaacson, From “Brave Little Israel” to “an Elite and
Domineering People”: The Image of Israel in France, 1944–1974, unpublished PhD
diss., The George Washington University, 2017.

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ISRAEL

On Vertical Alliances, ‘Perfidious Albion’ and

The sovereign is the representative of history. He holds the course of

Introduction: a dialogue of the deaf?

If history could be defined as that never-ending process whereby people

special commemorative events are rare occasions on which academic his-

68 European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019

I do not deny that this is an adventure. Are we never to have adventures?

British policy in Palestine, in other words, was not about independent

It [the experiment] is very audacious, and it is obvious that it may be a

European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019 69

Balfour Declaration accelerated processes of nationalization, and pushed a

70 European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019

Yerushalmi in one of his final lectures in which he famously argued that

European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019 71

72 European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019

European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019 73

doing so, this article wishes to contribute to a recent, ongoing historio-

74 European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019

it was fraught with a sense of British betrayal and switched to binary

The Whig interpretation of Zionist history

European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019 75

to English history needed to make Magna Carta Libertatum of 1215 the

76 European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019

Such narrations resemble, and not coincidentally, the romantic tone

European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019 77

78 European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019

So we are asked: Why a Jewish national homeland and not a Jewish

An independent nation-state, in other words, was not the agreed-upon

European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019 79

80 European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019

What is at stake here is not periodization alone or a scholarly quibble

European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019 81

the Napoleonic proclamation to constitute a crucial precedent, willing to

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European Judaism • Vol. 52 • No. 1 • Spring 2019 83

A considerable degree of ambivalence towards Britain was not peculiar

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of a ‘national home’, but it also tinted the asymmetrical vertical rela-

Once the English government produced a White Paper, to explain the

The British, in other words, were not accused of betrayal or deceit as

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inaugurating the so-called ‘maximalist’ faction, was probably the first

To atone the face of the stolen,

With a powerful scepter you will rule.

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As you take pride,

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Through poetry and popular novels, then, this kind of ‘Perfidious

The united anti-colonial front of Revisionist and labour Zionists, which

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a longue durée historical explanation that strived to identify the religious

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cent of the population at the time, as well as the continued dedication of

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Conclusion: Hannah Arendt reads Kafka

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a sense of collective security that is not proffered by an external contrac-

Arendt returned to the subject in November 1941, in an opinion piece