The scene takes place on a beautiful night in 1916, in the Westminster district of London. Two elegantly dressed gentlemen stroll under the pale glow of the moon. They discuss the future of Palestine, this province of the Ottoman Empire that His Majesty’s army is preparing to conquer, as a continuation of the Arab revolt galvanized by Thomas Edward Lawrence, known as “Lawrence of Arabia”.
The man with the goatee and mustache who leads the conversation is Chaïm Weizmann, 42, a renowned Jewish chemist and professor at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom). Haunted by the pogroms of Tsarist Russia where he was born, the man who would become the first president of the State of Israel then headed the British branch of the World Zionist Organization. This movement, launched at the end of the 19the century by an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, campaigned for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The ancestral homeland of this ghost nation, scattered to the four winds, was then inhabited by 500,000 Arabs and fewer than 40,000 Jews.
The man who listens, lustrous hair and graying bacchantes, is the former Conservative Prime Minister (1902-1905), Lord Arthur James Balfour, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Ironically, in 1905, he had passed a very restrictive law, intended to stem the flow of victims of anti-Semitic persecution from Eastern Europe, who were flocking across the Channel at that time. Like many of his peers, Balfour is steeped in prejudices against Jews, of whom he distrusts as much as he idealizes them.
Thanks to a journalist friend, Weizmann penetrated British ruling circles. His sesame? A process for manufacturing synthetic acetone, a compound essential for the production of explosives. In the midst of a conflict with Germany, the main exporter of this solvent in Europe, the discovery comes at the right time. In return for his contribution to the war effort, Professor Weizmann gained the ear of the highest officials of the Crown.
Centuries of persecution
That night in 1916, while walking the streets of London in the company of Lord Balfour, with whom he had dinner, the Zionist leader hammered home his main argument: the interests of his movement and the United Kingdom were aligned. Although the man of science operates from a small, dark apartment in Piccadilly Circus, he has forged, through his charisma and his interpersonal skills, the image of a “king of the Jews”. As good Protestants, Balfour and the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, were steeped in the romantic mythology of the return to Zion, presented as the prelude to final redemption, the second coming of Christ to earth.
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