When Shuli Davidovich departed from her job as press secretary to the Israeli Embassy in London in 2006, she fired a parting shot at one of her old sparring partners. 

“For some people, especially on papers such as the Guardian … the human face of the Israeli doesn’t exist,” she said in an interview. “It’s always the helmet, the rifle, the aggressor, the occupier.”

Its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Guardian itself admits, is perhaps the most controversial aspect of the paper’s editorial output. “It comes under closer scrutiny than any other topic,” a leader column suggested, “with every word we publish being studied by self-appointed monitors on both sides”. 

In truth, it is the accusation that the paper is inherently biased in its coverage of Israel, adopting at times an anti-Zionist agenda, which rests at the heart of this controversy.

It was not, though, always this way. Having strongly advocated its establishment, the Guardian was a staunch supporter of the state of Israel for the first two decades of its existence — that is until, in its eyes, David became Goliath after 1967. After that — as the title of a book the paper itself commissioned in 2004 to examine its long, and increasingly rocky, relationship with Israel puts it — disenchantment set in.

But the tangled history between Britain’s leading liberal newspaper and the Jewish state began long before 1948. 

Ninety years ago this month, CP Scott — the newspaper’s renowned editor, publisher and owner — stood down after an astonishing 57 years at the helm. Scott remains a revered figure for the Guardian — his words, “comment is free… but facts are sacred”, adorn its opinion pages — and the Scott Trust is part of its unique ownership structure.

It is therefore no small irony, given the charges levelled against the modern-day paper, that Scott was an ardent Zionist who played a key role in helping to the secure the Balfour Declaration.

That role began in November 1914 when Scott met Chaim Weizmann, a leading player in Zionist politics, by chance at a charity tea party to which the latter’s wife has been invited. Thus began the remarkable friendship and partnership between the publisher and Israel’s first president. 

Weizmann later recalled: “I saw before me a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman, advanced in years, but very alert and attentive. He was inquisitive about my origin and work.” 

“I am a Jew and if you want to talk about that, Mr Scott, I am at your disposal,” Weizmann remembered saying. 

The two men were soon deep in a conversation: discussing the suffering of the Jews and Weizmann’s “hopes and aspirations for Palestine”. Weizmann instantly impressed the editor. For Scott, he was “extraordinarily interesting, a rare combination of idealism and the severely practical which are the two essentials of statesmanship”.

That idealism was evident in Weizmann’s “perfectly clear sense of Jewish nationalism, an intense and burning sense of the Jew as Jew, just as strong, perhaps more so, as that of the German as German or the Englishman as Englishman”. 

From this nationalism, Scott later wrote, flowed “his demand for a country, a homeland which for him, and for anyone sharing his view of Jewish nationality, can be no other that the ancient home of his race”.

Weizmann was similarly impressed by Scott, finding him “so unaffected, so open, [and] so charming”. As he later wrote the editor “gave me courage”. 

Scott, in fact, gave Weizmann much more than that. Their early meetings, as Jonathan Schneer puts it in his history of the Balfour Declaration, “would prove crucial to Weizmann’s political ascent”. Scott, moreover, was not simply the editor and owner of the pre-eminent voice of British progressivism, he was also a former MP for the governing Liberal party. 

After their second meeting, Scott made Weizmann an offer: “I would like to do something for you. I would like to put you in touch with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George.” He also reminded Weizmann that “you have a Jew in the Cabinet, Herbert Samuel”.

The prospect of meeting the former appealed to Weizmann rather more than the latter. To Weizmann, Samuel was an assimilated Jew, whose lack of sympathy for Zionism could be easily surmised. 

But the encounter with Samuel produced a surprise: the President of the Local Government Board believed that Turkey’s entry into the war made realisation of the “Zionist dream” a possibility and he was already preparing a paper for Cabinet. “If I were a religious Jew I would have thought the Messianic times were near,” a delighted Weizmann told the minister. The two men soon met again and discussed Samuel’s Cabinet memorandum, which was tweaked in the light of Weizmann’s suggestions.

Scott then arranged a meeting with David Lloyd George and helped prepare him for it. At 11 Downing Street, the Chancellor grilled Weizmann relentlessly, as Scott had warned him he would. However, Lloyd George ended the meeting a supporter of Weizmann’s goals and admirer of the man himself. “When you and I are forgotten,” he told Samuel, “this man will have a monument to him in Palestine”. 

However, Samuel’s proposals died in Cabinet. The Prime Minister, Henry Herbert Asquith, proved an implacable foe of even the faintest hint of Zionism and privately disdained Samuel’s “dithyrambic memorandum”. During the Cabinet discussion, Samuel had but one strong supporter: Lloyd George. 

This setback deterred neither Scott nor Weizmann. “Scott took his role as Weizmann’s political and personal sponsor seriously,” writes Daphna Baram in Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel. “He kept introducing him to leading politicians, bringing him along to breakfasts at Whitehall, and opening for him doors he could never have hoped to enter without the assistance of his patron.”

Indeed, as Baram also recounts, Scott did not confine his assistance to Weizmann to matters concerning Zionism. When Weizmann — whose scientific research had led him to discover a means to produce on an industrial scale the acetone used in cordite — became director of the Admiralty’s laboratories during the war, he frequently called upon Scott to help him resolve the various bureaucratic battles in which he became embroiled. 

While many gentiles who supported Zionism at this time were driven by the perceived benefits which would accrue to the British war-effort, Scott’s backing sprung from more romantic notions. He saw the “New Judaea”, he later wrote, as “the vital link between East and West, between the old world and the new”.

Aside from the editor’s personal sympathies, Scott’s newspaper contained a cadre of steadfastly Zionist journalists, including Harry Sacher, Herbert Sidebotham and future editor William Crozier. 

With Weizmann’s blessing, Sacher, Sidebotham and two ambitious young retailers — Simon Marks and Israel Sieff (later of Marks and Spencer fame) — formed the British Palestine Committee. Sacher edited its magazine, Palestine — which aimed to “reset the ancient glories of the Jewish nation in the freedom of a new British dominion in Palestine” — with Sidebotham chairing the committee. The committee’s appeal for patrons produced only 10 responses: among the couple that were positive were Scott’s.

To Weizmann and his young friends — the self-proclaimed “Manchester School of Zionism” — Scott had become, in Baram’s words, something of “a father figure”.  By 1917, with Lloyd George having replaced Asquith in Downing Street and another sympathiser, Arthur Balfour, installed at the Foreign Office, achieving British support for the Zionists’ aspirations moved a step closer.   

But then, in April 1917, Scott stumbled across a crucial bit of news. At a meeting with a French journalist he discovered that the French planned to assume control of northern Palestine — areas that the Zionists hoped would become part of a Jewish homeland under British protection — while the rest of the land would fall under international control. Having thus learned of elements of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement, by which Britain and France planned to carve up the Middle East after the war, Scott immediately tipped off Sacher and Weizmann and began making enquiries back in London. Weizmann too began frantic efforts to uncover more details, pushing at the Whitehall doors Scott had previously unlocked for him. 

Critically, Scott’s discovery led the Zionists, in Sacher’s words, to realise the urgency of getting from the British government “a written definite promise satisfactory to ourselves with regard to Palestine”. 

In November 1917, in the form of that famous letter from Balfour to Lord Rothschild, they finally obtained it. Days later, Scott penned a Guardian editorial welcoming the Balfour Declaration that he himself had played a part in bringing about. It was, he enthused “at once the fulfilment of an aspiration, the signpost of a destiny”.