Smuts, Jan Christian

(1870–1950)

   South African statesman. In the political lobbying that led up to the BALFOUR Declaration of 1917, Dr WEIZMANN found an unexpected ally in the austere and respected South African defence minister, General Smuts, who had been coopted as a member of LLOYD GEORGE’S War Cabinet. Like the Welshman Lloyd George, Smuts belonged to a small nation whose traditional outlook was steeped in the Old Testament, and who felt an affinity with the ancient Hebrews. It was not difficult for Weizmann to persuade Smuts that it would be an act of historic justice to restore the People of the Book to the Land of the Bible. Smuts might himself have been the liberator of the Holy Land. Lloyd George was keen on pressing an offensive against the Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean, early in 1917, and offered Smuts the command. The South African declined, having been persuaded that such a command would be a sideshow of dubious value and little prospect of success. Later that year, after ALLENBY had taken Jerusalem, Smuts was sent on behalf of the War Cabinet to study the possibility of a decisive blow against Turkey. But a new German thrust in the west compelled the withdrawal of Allenby’s best troops. At the end of the war Smuts was one of the architects of the League of Nations and the mandate system. After he succeeded General Botha as prime minister, he continued to follow the fortunes of the Jewish National Home and to give it public and diplomatic support. It was a source of great pride to him that the kibbutz of Ramat Yochanan (‘Height of John’) near Haifa was named after him.