Sir Mark Sykes, Britain’s chief diplomatic negotiator on Middle East affairs, had an answer. How could Britain keep Russia on its feet and America committed in the meantime? Russia was floundering and on the verge of being knocked out of the war, and it would be many months, perhaps more than a year, before new American armies could be trained, transported, and organized to plug the holes on the weakened Western Front. In autumn 1917 the British War Cabinet faced a dire prospect. The Zionists, who knew their own powerlessness, never dreamed they held such influence or aspired to anything of the sort. (Zionist is a loaded word, to be sure, but it literally means someone who believes in a Jewish state.) The Balfour Declaration was actually based on the ludicrous belief that the Zionist leaders of the time controlled the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the political destiny of the United States.
This was not out of British love for the Jews and the Zionists among them.
The idea of Israel had its real advocates among the British, who in 1917 issued the famous Balfour Declaration, calling for the creation of a Jewish state. In fact, the first president to address the issue was Woodrow Wilson, who was hostile to the idea of a “Jewish national home in Palestine.” According to the rhetoric of the most severe critics of Israel, Israel is the unholy spawn of the United States.
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