Kategori
🗞
HaberlerDöküm
00:00It's 67 words long, it's 100 years old, and it changed the course of history for the Middle East and the Jewish people.
00:09The Balfour Declaration, the expression of the British government's support for a Jewish home in Palestine,
00:16was sent by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to the 2nd Lord Rothschild.
00:22I'm here in Buckinghamshire at Wadderstone Manor to speak with the 4th Lord Rothschild about the Balfour Declaration,
00:29what it means for Britain, for the Jewish people and the Rothschild family.
00:38The Foreign Office, November 2nd, 1917.
00:44Dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government,
00:50the following Declaration of Sympathy with Jewish Zionist Aspirations,
00:55which has been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet.
01:01So it's possibly the most famous letter in modern Jewish history, and it begins with three words.
01:09Dear Lord Rothschild, why was it that this letter was sent by the Foreign Secretary to your great uncle Walter?
01:17It's an interesting question because he was really interested in ornithology, although he became interested in Zionism.
01:28I think the reason was this, that it was primarily a movement from Eastern Europe.
01:38But they didn't clarify who was in charge of that movement.
01:44And in addition, it was after all in Great Britain.
01:48So they felt that the Rothschild family should be the one to whom it was addressed.
01:55And Walter was Lord Rothschild, and he was a Zionist.
02:00And those rarely are the background reasons.
02:03So Walter received the Balfour Declaration, and I have a copy here.
02:08And I wonder if I could possibly ask you to read it for us.
02:11Yes, indeed.
02:12Yeah.
02:13I'm going to put on my spectacles to make sure I read it accurately.
02:19His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment of Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people,
02:28and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object,
02:33it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,
02:42or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
02:48I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
02:54Yours, Arthur Balfour.
02:56And here it is, the Balfour Declaration.
02:59What do you feel when you see it here?
03:02I genuinely feel it's one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of the Jewish people.
03:08If you think it took 3,000 years to get to this.
03:12And then you say, how did this miracle happen?
03:16It's the most incredible piece of opportunism.
03:20I mean, if you think you had an impoverished would-be scientist,
03:24Heim Weizmann, who somehow gets to England,
03:28meets a few people, including members of my family,
03:31seduces them, he has such great charm and conviction.
03:36He gets to Balfour, and he unbelievably persuades Balfour, and Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, and most of the ministers,
03:48that this idea of the national home for Jews should be allowed to take place.
03:56I mean, it's so, so unlikely.
04:00And then he's, you know, starts to fight a difficult battle with the British cabinet.
04:06And this letter goes through five drafts, as you know.
04:10And in the end, it comes out as a rather compromising letter.
04:15I mean, the essential point is there for the Jewish community to fasten onto.
04:21You have the first bit, which promises a national home rather than the national home.
04:27And then you have the bit that nothing that's to be done should in any way harm the Arab community.
04:34But you come back to the big point, which is that this is perhaps the greatest event in Jewish life for thousands of years.
04:44And it's a miracle that it took place.
04:46And of course, the Rothschild family then as now filled two roles,
04:50because it wasn't just a leader of diaspora Jewry.
04:54It also played a very significant role in the early years of the establishment of the pioneer communities in Israel as well.
05:01There were two branches of the Rothschild family primarily concerned.
05:08One in France through Baron Edmund Rothschild, who was the one who responded to the Russian programs in the 1880s.
05:17In England, there was a divide.
05:21And some of the Rothschilds, in particular, Baron Edmund's son, James, known as Jimmy,
05:28had come from France partly because of the Dreyfus case and his horror about what had happened to live in England.
05:36He was educated to Cambridge University.
05:39And he married an English girl, Mrs. James de Rothschild.
05:43And she became a leader at a very young age.
05:46She was only 17 when she started writing to Weitzman and introducing him to the British establishment.
05:53Other Rothschilds felt it was better to be assimilated into English life.
06:00And although they retained their interest in Judaism and Jewish life, they didn't think it was a good thing that this national home should be established in Israel.
06:10So it was something that divided my family, as with many other families.
06:14I wonder, as somebody who moves in the highest echelons of British society and is very close to Israel,
06:22whether you in your life feel a tension between concern for Israel and loyalty to Britain?
06:29No, I don't personally feel that.
06:32I mean, I've been completely committed to Israel since the early 1960s and have been there every year since.
06:40So I don't feel that conflict, but I, of course, feel a huge loyalty to Great Britain.
06:47Just tell us a little bit more about Walter, the second Lord Rothschilds, because he was an unusual and colourful character.
06:54He was a deeply eccentric man.
06:58But from a very early age, his passion was collecting.
07:03He rode about Tring Park on a giant tortoise.
07:09He had a zebra carriage.
07:12A carriage pulled by zebras.
07:14Yes.
07:15He collected on a massive scale birds, insects, fleas, butterflies.
07:25He was the largest single collection created by a single individual.
07:30I think that's true.
07:31I think certainly in Great Britain, I think probably anywhere, he was the greatest collector of ornithological material.
07:39His niece, Miriam, writes that for two years, as one of his eccentricities, he didn't open any of the letters that were sent to him and stuffed them away into wicker baskets.
07:53And it does make you wonder what would have happened if the Balfour Declaration, the letter, had been one of those letters that he'd actually stuffed.
08:01That's true.
08:02At that stage, and it's very difficult to quite understand why, he had taken a deep interest in what was happening about the possible de Balfour Declaration.
08:15So maybe those letters would have got to the top of his pile.
08:19I just want to revisit for a moment your cousin, Dorothy, who you mentioned, who at an extraordinarily young age, still in her teens, played such a critical role as a go-between and a facilitator for Chaim Weizmann.
08:34Can you say a little bit about that?
08:36Well, she married my cousin, Jimmy, when she was 17.
08:41So this is your cousin, Dorothy, Dolly?
08:44Yep.
08:45This is James de Rothschild.
08:47And from her teenage years onwards, she was a major supporter of Israel, wasn't she?
08:53Major supporter.
08:54I mean, she worships her husband, who'd been deeply committed, son of Baron Edmour.
09:01It was due to him, I think, that she became interested.
09:04But once she became interested, she became passionately interested.
09:09After his death, she became even more committed.
09:12She just wanted to carry out his wishes and what he cared deeply about.
09:18And then she had her own personality, a deeply good human being, who was quite unselfish.
09:26She devoted herself to this place, to Israel, and to a few friends and had a wonderful life.
09:34And you can read letters from her to Weizmann and from Weizmann to her when she was only 17.
09:43And what she did, which was crucially important, was to connect up Weizmann with the British establishment.
09:51I think she also trained him in how to deal.
09:54She helped educate how to conduct himself.
09:57She was excluded at that age, but she did tell Weizmann how to integrate, how to insert himself into British establishment life, which she learned very quickly.
10:11So I'm here in the Watterston Manor archives, where there is a treasure trove of remarkable documents from the time of the Balfour Declaration.
10:23We have the correspondence here between the teenage Dorothy and her husband James.
10:31And it's really a love story.
10:34Here, Dorothy is writing to James.
10:36She says,
10:37Jimmy, I thought I would not like one day to pass without giving you a piece of news you have never heard before.
10:44I love you.
10:45But of course, their correspondence wasn't just romantic correspondence.
10:49Here we have detailed letters describing her dealings with Zionist leaders, her advice and her suggestions regarding the conferences of the Zionist movement.
11:00And here we have a letter that the young Dorothy, still not 20, sent to Dr. Chaim Weizmann, where she's talking about the meetings that she's arranged for him.
11:11And as we've heard, she was helpful in training and preparing him to enter into the highest echelons of British society to advance the cause of the Zionist movement.
11:23And she was an important character in your life as well. She really introduced you to Israel in some ways.
11:28She was a crucially important character in my life. I became a trustee of Yad Hanadiv over 50 years ago.
11:35Which is the Rothschild Philanthropic Foundation.
11:38Yes, the Dina Foundation. And I think I first went in 1962.
11:45Can you share with us your sense of what things have been changing in Israel since that first visit?
11:52Yes. As Israel, I think, became more and more successful in all sorts of ways.
12:02Industrially successful, absorption successful, technologically successful, great universities.
12:11The problems with the wars that took place being the clearest examples of security became more paramount.
12:22And so you did see a shift in Israel from kind of the liberal Western place that it had been in the early 60s to something of a very different character.
12:36And you also have a shift, of course, between communities in Israel.
12:42I mean, Israel is a patchwork of different immigrants from different countries.
12:48And you have the religious, you have the non-religious, you have a town like Tel Aviv, which is attractive to the kind of business community, to what I would call ordinary city life.
13:04And then you have Jerusalem, which remains a very religious city and full of conflict between Arab neighbors and itself.
13:16Those internal issues within the fabric of Israeli society are one of the main focuses of Yad Han Nadiv.
13:23Can you mention just one or two of the projects that feel to you most significant?
13:27Yes.
13:28We do a great deal of work on education, a great deal of academic work.
13:34We keep going at Ramat Hanadiv, the garden where Baron Edmond was eventually buried.
13:42We're on the point of building the new National Library of Israel.
13:48Two unexpected ones, perhaps.
13:50If you take the Orthodox community, it's important that they have employment.
13:57And we're trying to develop programs which is possible for them to undertake.
14:04Similarly, you have a problem with Arab unemployment.
14:08And we set up jointly with the government employment centers to facilitate greater employment of Arabs within Israel.
14:19And so we're an active foundation trying to help with these fish shores in Israeli life and to do some good.
14:28And we're sitting here looking forward to the 100th anniversary of this significant letter.
14:36If I can just ask you to think about the next centennial, a hundred years time, and just maybe share some of your hopes, your aspirations about where Israel will be.
14:49What does one hope for?
14:52One, of course, hopes for a peaceful relationship with Israel's neighbors.
14:59And that's going to be the most difficult matter of all to achieve.
15:04But even now, you can see with the disarray in the Middle East and the importance of relationships that Israel is developing,
15:14not only with Jordan, but also with Egypt and indeed with Saudi Arabia, even if they're not publicized because of the Sunni-Shiite war, there's hope.
15:25And I think if you take the need of Arab nations to have intelligence help.
15:33And if, on the other hand, you take compassion and generosity coming from Israel to Palestinian territories and its less fortunate neighbors,
15:44there are grounds for optimism.
15:47And I am an optimist.
15:50Lord Rothschild, thank you very much indeed.