About Conkers and Israeli / Palestinian Conflicts
ABOUT CONKERS AND ISRAELI / PALESTINIAN CONFLICTS
(A Brief Summary of Part of an Intractable Problem)
By now local children will have collected their conkers in Grange Park. But let us stop a moment to consider how conkers relate directly to a century of conflict in the Middle East.
It began with a Jewish scientist named Chaim Weizmann. He was born in Russia in 1874 and after a rather colourful early life he was to become a professor of organic chemistry at Manchester University in 1904. By this time, he had become a committed Zionist campaigning for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
(Incidentally, the British government had long been sympathetic to finding a Jewish homeland, and at one time they had offered the Uganda Protectorate as a possibility, partly to offset the ruinous cost of building a railway line through Kenya from Mombasa to Lake Victoria).
Back to Weizmann. Ten years of research at Manchester had led to him inventing a process to obtain acetone by fermenting starchy materials. It is now the start of the First World War, and the armament industry is in need of huge quantities of acetone to manufacture high explosive cordite.
At the beginning of the war, they relied on imported maize for the starch. But when supply routes were cut, Lloyd George, as Minister of Munitions, required that starch should come from closer to home. Weizman proposed horse chestnuts. There were factories at Poole in Dorset and by the dockside at King’s Lynn in Norfolk, producing as much as 90,000 gallons of acetone a year. Children collected the conkers and because the factory locations were top secret the collected conkers were sent to London to be passed on to the factories.
As the process was being kept secret, there were local suspicions that private profit was being made from voluntary efforts of the children. It was said that because so many conkers were collected around the country there were transport problems and piles of rotting conkers were left at railway stations.
Weizmann was thus the man of the moment, but a quid pro quo raised its head. “Seeing that I have helped the war effort, how about the British Government ceding part of Palestine (where the British had some influence) to become a Jewish Homeland? Prevarications ensued, and in 1919 when Palestine was under British control as a Mandated Territory following the defeat of the Ottomans the Balfour Declaration was issued: “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” (Author’s Bold and Underline)
We now know just how well that ideal worked out.
An historical footnote: When the state of Israel was founded in 1948, Weizman became its first president.
Tony Hodge