Why did the British Government issue the Balfour Declaration in 1917, promising to support the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine? Historians and interested parties across the spectrum have advanced numerous explanations: for example that Lloyd George and others in his government wished to do something for the Jews, or even for an individual Jew, Chaim Weizmann the Zionist leader, who was also a chemist contributing in important ways to the war effort; that British imperialist interests dictated it; that the desire to outbid German and Turkish appeals for Jewish support played a role; that the British wartime government believed the gesture would persuade world Jewry, the secret power behind Bolshevism, pacifism and global finance (!), to support the Entente powers. James Renton believes that this last explanation is the most persuasive, but in his book he gives it a twist: the Balfour Declaration is best understood as a piece of propaganda pure and simple: it was designed solely to attract support from the Jews, mainly the Jews of America; moreover, it was a wartime expedient which the British Government never intended to fulfil.

The ideological basis of the Balfour Declaration, according to Renton, was a pre-war understanding of ethnicity in general, not only of Jewish ethnicity. It was one part romantic and two parts racist. Members of the Foreign Office, War Office, and War Cabinet, the policy-making élite as Renton terms them, believed that race was primordial and ineradicable. They thought English Jews were Jews first and English only secondarily. Therefore they accepted from the outset the Zionist contention that Jews formed a distinct nationality. They were a people apart. Lloyd George, Balfour, Milner, Curzon, Cecil, Sykes, and the rest thought that Jews who wished to assimilate in Britain or elsewhere were unnatural Jews, denying their identity, and were anyway a minority among their own people (Renton does not point out that Milner's aide, the Conservative MP Leopold Amery, who helped with the language of the Declaration, and who was a member of the élite, was himself half-Jewish).

Renton believes that the Zionists understood the anti-Semitic bases of the government's attitude, and consciously played upon them. The Zionist leaders (among whom he accords Jabotinsky and several relative unknowns pride of place, while playing down the importance of Weizmann) believed that the best way to attain their goal was to gain British support for it. So they never denied that Jews played the crucial role in both world radicalism and world finance, and they encouraged men like Balfour to think that a statement about the future of Palestine would win over this powerful and politically homogenous ethnic group.

Thus the Zionist masquerade, as Renton understands it, was multi-layered: of course the Zionists knew that Jewry did not have the powers ascribed to it; they even knew, although they did not like it, that the vast majority of Jews were not Zionists; from the other side, the policy-makers knew that they did not really intend to establish a homeland for the Jews in Palestine but only wanted their support in order to win the war. The British used the Zionists; the Zionists used the British. Renton implicitly adds another layer to the masquerade: he believes, although he does not develop the argument, that the Jews are not in any event a people apart, but adherents of a belief system. They can be one hundred per cent American, or French or Russian (or British), and still be Jewish as well.

Renton has got hold of one thread and he follows it, looking neither to left nor right. There are advantages to the approach. The issuing of the Declaration does not end the story in this volume as he is intent on tracing its role as a tool for propaganda. Thus, Renton examines the uses to which the Declaration was put. He examines subsequent manifestations of Allied philo-Semitic gesturing as well: notably the Zionist Commission sent by the British Government, with the king's blessing, to make contact with the non-Jewish majority in Palestine; the American Zionist Medical Unit sent to Palestine during the War; the creation of the Jewish Legion and its dispatch to the Middle East, and Allenby's carefully scripted entry into Jerusalem. He examines the effectiveness of the propaganda machine which exploited these gestures, especially in the United States. Most bracingly, he examines critically the construction of the myth that Britain always had been philo-Semitic and that the Balfour Declaration was the logical culmination of a long history. This is all original and interesting work.

But there are disadvantages to following a single thread. The Balfour Declaration promised the Jewish people a ‘homeland’ in Palestine. What precisely did it mean by that? What did the Zionists understand it to mean? Renton barely touches upon this vital question. He subtly defines the outlook of the policy-makers towards Jews, and other ethnic groups, and locates its roots in nineteenth-century understandings of race and nationalism. But during the war Lenin's revolutionary internationalism, and Wilson's liberal internationalism altered that world view. This seems apparent, for example, in the evolution of Mark Sykes, whose private papers deposited at Hull University reveal his changing attitudes towards Jews, Armenians and, most importantly, towards British imperialism itself. Renton knows about all this; but focused as he is upon his thesis, he fails to chart Sykes's evolution, or that of anyone else.

As for the basic argument: that the Declaration was designed to win over Jewish support has been understood since 1917. That it was designed for no other reason Renton can assert but never prove. For how can you prove a negative—that British imperialist designs upon the Middle East, for instance, played no significant role when the policy-makers framed the Balfour Declaration? Indeed, it is doubly odd that Renton takes the approach he does, given that nine years ago he published an article entitled ‘The Historiography of the Balfour Declaration: Toward a Multi-causal Framework’.1 In sum: by emphasising how British officials used, and always intended to use, the Balfour Declaration as a propaganda tool, James Renton has made a useful contribution to historical knowledge. Inevitably, however, the narrowness of his focus means that The Zionist Masquerade cannot represent the last word upon the subject.

http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/conten...07/479.extract

There's a book about it:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Zio.../9780230547186