Sir Herbert Samuel and the government of Palestine

Abstract

When, in April 1920, Lloyd George asked Herbert Samuel to undertake the government of Palestine, the mandate for which had just been assigned to Great Britain, he was quite deliberately offering the appointment to someone who sympathized with Zionism and would try to make a success of the Zionist programme. Samuel's interest in and involvement with Zionism dated at least from the outbreak of the War in 1914. When in November of that year the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers, he was quick to suggest to Grey-the Foreign Secretary-the possibility of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine; the following January he sent Asquith a memorandum on this subject, its romantic rhetoric startling and somewhat amusing the Prime Minister. 'The Jewish brain', declared the Chairman of the Local Government Board, 'is a physiological product not to be despised. For fifteen centuries the race produced in Palestine a constant succession of great men-statesmen and prophets, judges and soldiers. If a body be again given in which its soul can lodge, it may enrich the world. Till full scope is granted, as Macaulay said in the House of Commons, let us not presume to say that there is no genius among the countrymen of Isaiah, no heroism among the descendants of the Maccabees.'1 The following March a revised version of this memorandum was circulated to the Cabinet, of which Samuel was a member. In it, he argued that British imperial interests required a British protectorate over Palestine, and that this might provide an opportunity for Jews to immigrate, found colonies and develop the country so that in due course a majority would become settled in and rooted to the land. 'Let a Jewish centre be established in Palestine', he urged, 'let it achieve, as it may well achieve, some measure of spiritual and intellectual greatness, and insensibly the character of the individual Jew, wherever he might be, would be raised. The sordid associations which have attached to the Jewish name would be, to some degree at least, sloughed off, and the value of the Jews as an element in the civilization of the European peoples would be enhanced.'2 These, clearly, are the words of a convinced Zionist, who accepts and takes for granted the Zionist analysis of the Jewish predicament and how to surmount it. And for the rest of the War, indeed until his appointment as High Commissioner at the end of April 1920, whether in or out of office, though he was not a member of the Zionist Organization, he remained helpful and sympathetic to the movement. In 1918 and 1919, in particular, as he says in his Memoirs, he was 'co-operating closely' with the Zionist leaders,3 and even ready, at times, to use his influence and connections to further their cause. Thus we find him, for instance, writing to Balfour in March 1919 to express his disquiet at the news of an inter-Allied Com-