| Arthur and the Acetone | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Written by | George Bernard Shaw |
| Date premiered | unperformed |
| Original language | English |
| Subject | Chaim Weizmann gets Arthur Balfour to give him Jerusalem |
| Genre | satire |
| Setting | Whitehall |
Arthur and the Acetone (1936) is a satirical playlet by George Bernard Shaw which dramatises an imaginary conversation between the Zionist Chaim Weizmann and the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, which Shaw presents as the "true" story of how the Balfour Declaration came into being.
In 1936 a Special Commission created by the left-wing group the "Independent Labour Forty" had written a report about the 1917 Balfour declaration, which had committed the British government to bring about a Jewish homeland in Palestine after World War I. The Special Commission concluded that the plan was part of an Imperialist strategy to control the Middle East by promoting support for the British Empire among Jews and obtaining "Jewish finance" for the war effort, with a long term purpose of securing access to India and to Middle Eastern oil.
Shaw thought that this explanation attributed far too much Machiavellian brilliance to Balfour, and proposed his own alternative account, represented in the playlet. Shaw says that the declaration was extracted by Weizmann for his contribution to the war effort, in particular his help as a chemist in finding new ways to manufacture acetone cheaply. This claim was in circulation at the time, as it had been expressed by David Lloyd George in his Memoirs, published in 1933. [1]
Act 1: Balfour is appalled by the cost of the war, especially the need for acetone to make cordite. His attache says that there is a chemist who might be able to help, but unfortunately he is a Jew — and from Manchester. Balfour says that prejudice must be put to one side.
Act 2: Weizmann arrives. Balfour says they need more acetone. Weizmann says he can get it, if Balfour gives him Jerusalem. Balfour agrees, while insisting that the Holy Land as a whole "belongs to the Church of England".
Act 3: Shaw reads about the Balfour declaration, and predicts it will create "another Belfast".
The playlet was published in The New Leader on 29 November 1936. [2] Shaw later wrote a similar playlet about the origin of party politics entitled The British Party System . A Jewish chemist based on Weizmann is portrayed in similar terms in Shaw's later play Farfetched Fables . [3]
The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917.
Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour,, also known as Lord Balfour, was a British Conservative statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 to 1905. As foreign secretary in the Lloyd George ministry, he issued the Balfour Declaration of 1917 on behalf of the cabinet, which supported a "home for the Jewish people" in Palestine.
Chaim Azriel Weizmann was a Russian-born biochemist, Zionist leader and Israeli statesman who served as president of the Zionist Organization and later as the first president of Israel. He was elected on 16 February 1949, and served until his death in 1952. Weizmann was fundamental in obtaining the Balfour Declaration and later convincing the United States government to recognize the newly formed State of Israel.
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The Faisal–Weizmann Agreement was a 3 January 1919 agreement between Emir Faisal, the third son of Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, King of the short-lived Kingdom of Hejaz, and Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist leader who had negotiated the 1917 Balfour Declaration with the British government, signed two weeks before the start of the Paris Peace Conference. Together with a letter written by T. E. Lawrence in Faisal's name to Felix Frankfurter in March 1919, it was one of two documents used by the Zionist delegation at the Peace Conference to argue that the Zionist plans for Palestine had prior approval of Arabs.
Herbert Louis Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel, was a British Liberal politician who was the party leader from 1931 to 1935.
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The Peel Commission, formally known as the Palestine Royal Commission, was a British Royal Commission of Inquiry, headed by Lord Peel, appointed in 1936 to investigate the causes of unrest in Mandatory Palestine, which was administered by Great Britain, following a six-month-long Arab general strike.
Nahum ben Joseph Samuel Sokolow was a Zionist leader, author, translator, and a pioneer of Hebrew journalism.
Norman de Mattos Bentwich was a British barrister and legal academic. He was the British-appointed attorney-general of Mandatory Palestine and a lifelong Zionist.
Zionism as an organized movement is generally considered to have been founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. However, the history of Zionism began earlier and is related to Judaism and Jewish history. The Hovevei Zion, or the Lovers of Zion, were responsible for the creation of 20 new Jewish towns in Palestine between 1870 and 1897.
L. J. Greenberg, born Leopold Jacob Greenberg (1861–1931), was a British journalist. He had become an energetic propagandist of the new Zionism in England by the Third Zionist Congress in 1899, at which he and Jacob de Haas were elected as members of the ZO's Propaganda Committee. His frequent dialectical debates were conducted as editor of The Jewish Chronicle, the leading paper in Britain for the Jewish community. Greenberg called for decency and humanity towards World Jewry.
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The Mandate for Palestine was a League of Nations mandate for British administration of the territories of Palestine and Transjordan, both of which had been conceded by the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I in 1918. The mandate was assigned to Britain by the San Remo conference in April 1920, after France's concession in the 1918 Clemenceau–Lloyd George Agreement of the previously-agreed "international administration" of Palestine under the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Transjordan was added to the mandate after the Arab Kingdom in Damascus was toppled by the French in the Franco-Syrian War. Civil administration began in Palestine and Transjordan in July 1920 and April 1921, respectively, and the mandate was in force from 29 September 1923 to 15 May 1948 and to 25 May 1946 respectively.
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The British Party System (1944) is a "playlet" by George Bernard Shaw satirically analysing the origins of the party system in British politics in the form of a pair of conversations between scheming power-brokers at various points in history, who devise it and adapt it to suit their personal ends.
Farfetched Fables (1948) is a collection of six short plays by George Bernard Shaw in which he outlines several of his most idiosyncratic personal ideas. The fables are preceded by a long preface. The ideas in the plays and the preface have been called the "violent unabashed prejudices of an eccentric".
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