Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 24
The first Great Power to declare support for Zionism was France not Britain
If there’s one thing that Zionists and antiZionists agree on it’s this: the Balfour Declaration, issued by the British government on 2nd November 1917, was the great leap forward for the modern Zionism movement. I believe they are both are wrong.
The Declaration has acquired iconic status in both Zionist history and antiZionist demonology for two reasons: it was the first public expression of Great Power endorsement of the Zionist aspiration to re-establish sovereignty in the historical Jewish homeland; and it was incorporated into international law via the San Remo resolution of 1920 that paved the way for the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922. But a closer look at the historical record reveals a hidden truth: the Balfour Declaration wasn’t the first expression of Great Power support for Zionism.
At the end of World War One, there was widespread international sympathy for Zionism – including, as has recently been revealed, from China’s new post-imperial leadership [1]. The specifically British role in promoting Zionism via the Balfour Declaration was important but should not be overrated. London would not have adopted such a far-reaching policy decision without taking account of the likely response of its allies. How did Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour know that it would be so spectacularly well received? Because Chaim Weizmann, president of the British Zionist Federation, and his gifted colleagues had virtually guaranteed it through their tireless negotiations with senior officials around the word.
If the British affirmation of Jewish rights in 1917 proved a turning point for the international community’s attitude to the Jewish people, it wasn't the first enthusiastic endorsement Zionist aims by a powerful state. That accolade goes to one of the least phylosemitic countries - France. For Zionism’s game-changing diplomatic breakthrough antedated the Balfour letter by six months via the articulation, on 3rd June 1917, of a dramatic new policy by Jules Cambon, head of political section of French foreign ministry, and one of the great diplomats of the time. Here is the key section of Cambon’s letter:
“It would be a deed of justice and of reparation to assist, by the protection of the Allied Powers, in the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that Land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago. The French government, which entered this present war to defend a people wrongly attacked, and which continues the struggle to assure the victory of right over might, can but feel sympathy for your cause, the triumph of which is bound up with that of the Allies. I am happy to give you herewith such assurance.”
This French statement of support for Zionism became known as the Cambon Declaration. It was secured with the knowledge and approval of the French prime minister Alexandre Ribot, by a Zionist activist called Nahum Sokolow to whom the letter was addressed.
France was an unlikely sponsor of Zionism. The upper echelons of French society had been ambivalent about Jews for centuries. In 1789, when the Jews of Metz asked for protection against the threat of anti-Jewish mob violence (of which there had been outbursts in Alsace), Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, a liberal nobleman from Paris, asserted that, while the Jews suffered oppression, the state could not recognise their collective rights since "there cannot be a nation within a nation…The Jews should be denied everything as a nation but granted everything as individuals." This principle was incorporated into Napoleonic law.
The role of the Dreyfus Affair in persuading Herzl of the need for restored Jewish sovereignty is well documented if somewhat mythologised. What is not at issue is the shameful degree to which deep-seated antisemitism has long infected French politics, the army, the arts and academia. Both the colonisation and decolonisation of North Africa worsened the plight of Jews in that region. Few today realise that many Jews were sent to concentration camps during World War Two by the Vichy administration’s Nazi policies in its North African colonies as well as in mainland France.
So why did France support Zionism in the early twentieth century? Perhaps they saw it as a vehicle for implementing the secret Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement; if they did, they were wrong. More likely, they were moved by the persuasive powers of the Zionist leadership, and Sokolow in particular, combined with an awareness of the growing impact of President Wilson’s assertion of self-determination as a universal human right as the war was drawing to a close. Another critical factor may have been Sokolow’s coup, just weeks before his meeting with Cambon, in persuading Pope Benedict XV to reverse the Catholic church’s previous antipathy to Zionism (that was predicated on the belief that the Jewish people’s dispersion was punishment for their refusal to recognise Jesus as the Messiah). The return of the Jews to Palestine, opined the pontiff (according to Sokolow), was “providential: God has willed it.”
French support for Israel remained solid from 1948 until the early 1960s (even to the point of establishing a joint nuclear cooperation programme), driven in part by France’s fear that pan-Arabism might derail its operations in Algeria. But relations deteriorated sharply in 1967 when Israel had the temerity, in French eyes, to inflict a humiliating defeat on the Arab forces ranged against her. Following de Gaulle’s volte-face, France has been lukewarm about the Jewish state and has often acquiesced or even cooperated in UN-sponsored attacks on Israel.
Are there any signs, however minimal, of change in contemporary French attitudes towards either their Jewish citizens or Israel? Perhaps. There are glimmers of hope – France formally endorsed the IHRA [4] definition of antisemitism in December 2019 and shortly thereafter Paris became the first capital city to adopt it. And President Macron pulled French participation in the 2021 UN review of the openly antisemitic Durban “anti-racism” process launched in 2001. On the other hand, French support for engagement with the genocidal Iranian regime is more in line with traditional French insensitivity to Jewish concerns. Modern French antisemitism is notoriously aggressive, and for its political elites an obsessive “criticism of Israel” is a convenient (if transparent) cloak behind which it is disguised.
For antiZionists, steeped in a fake history of Zionism-as-colonialism, the revelation of the French role in the restoration of Jewish sovereignty will merely reinforce their prejudices – after all, one Great Power was much like another. But they miss the point. The geopolitical zeitgeist that shifted the tectonic plates of the post-World War One order was not colonialism but its polar opposite – self-determination for all peoples. Moreover, in the Jewish case the hard graft was performed by the Jews themselves. The Jewish national home wasn’t a gift granted to Jews by imperialists; Zionist aims were achieved by the blood, sweat and tears of Jewish endeavour in their homeland, Eretz Israel, combined with a sustained global charm offensive conducted by Weizmann, Sokolow and other Zionist leaders whose eloquent advocacy proved irresistible because it was based on truth and justice. Widespread international approval followed their efforts, not the other way round.
All who support universal human rights, including Jewish rights, should never forget Jules Cambon and the crucial role he played, as the colonial era began to draw to an end, in translating empty virtue signalling about the need for self-determination into a practical reality. Equally, the time is long overdue to honour properly the memory of Weizmann’s near-forgotten colleague, Nahum Sokolow, and to recognise his pivotal role in the struggle of the Jewish people against discrimination, oppression and imperialism.
1. Rothbart Z. Lost Letter on Zionism from ‘Father of the Chinese Nation’ Surfaces. The Librarians, 10.02.2021
2. Nahum Sokolow (1859-1936)
3. Kramer M. The forgotten truth about the Balfour Declaration. Mosaic Magazine, June 2017
4. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. About the IHRA non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism
