Jabotinsky’s Role, and the Jewish Legion’s, in Securing the Balfour Declaration

Martin Kramer has rightly attempted to resurrect Nahum Sokolow’s role in the Zionist diplomacy that led up to the Balfour Declaration. He demonstrates clearly the incremental progress of that diplomacy during World War I, and how the Zionist diplomats ensured that political significance was attached to each new step, no matter how seemingly insignificant. He also shows that Britain did not act in isolation but, working together with the Zionists, saw to it that its other wartime allies were on board.

The Zionist slogan of constructing a community of Jews in Palestine “dunam by dunam” can thus be seen to have applied to other sectors of Zionist endeavor as well. In this connection, Kramer points out how, in their talks with the British, the early Zionists made certain that everything was put down in writing. “Perfidious Albion” had a long record of making quiet verbal pledges and promises that afterward might be explained away.

In Kramer’s telling, Nahum Sokolow was a key figure in this entire process. His crucial role has indeed been “forgotten” (as Kramer’s title has it), and no academic biography of him has yet appeared. The writing of history, however, is a complex and selective process, and a telling in the present can often neglect or underplay the role of other central figures who were involved. Thus, only once in Kramer’s account does the name of the prominent Zionist leader Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky appear, and then only in Jabotinsky’s response to a December 1917 letter from the Austrian journalist Yaakov Landau.