William Yale asked Weizmann what he would do if the British did not support the Balfour Declaration for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. Yale said, "Weizmann pounded his fist on the table and the teacups jumped. 'If they don't,' he said, 'we'll smash the British Empire like we smashed the Russian Empire."
The quote in question comes from Robert John's Behind the Balfour Declaration: Britain's Great War Pledge to the Rothchild Bankers by Robert John and published by the Institute of Historical Review (note the hyperlink is for archive.org and not the IHR). John claims that the Weizmann quote comes from a private dinner he had with the American diplomat William Yale in 12 May 1970 in which the elderly American recalled that Weizmann said that during a dinner meeting "somewhere in the Mediterranean in 1919."
Almost all of this is open to question and pretty much nonsense for several reasons. Firstly, there is an enormous gap between the publication of John's account, 1988, and the actual 1970 conversation. Additionally, William Yale was not only and old man at this point in the conversation (82), but he died in 1975, making it impossible to establish the veracity of this claim. John asserts that Yale told him this information would be available in his papers after the latter's death, but John makes no effort to track these down, even though Yale has them and they are open to research. No other scholar has made this claim that Yale has said such based on these documents. Yale's death also makes relaying this conversation unsound methodological territory because Yale is not around to either confirm, qualify, or refute this conversation. Even if the Yale claim was accurate, the lack of proper context also makes it tricky to discern an actual motive behind Weizmann as to whether he was bluffing or trying to use the antisemitic rumor that Jews caused the downfall of the tsars to strengthen his position. Weizmann was not above using the antisemitic beliefs of gentiles in power if it would help him achieve his goal of a Jewish homeland.
The importance of John relaying this tale is of course related to his thesis that Jews manipulated the UK and somehow managed to use the magnificent power of the Rothchilds to get what they wanted. This is not a surprising thesis from a writer published by the Institute of Historical Review. The IHR is a known site for Holocaust denial and other conspiracies of Jewish control over the world. Although the IHR writers style themselves as historians, they are in fact charlatans and third-string wannabees. David Irving, for instance, has more or less told commentators like Ron Rosenbaum (on p. 233 for reference- and unlike John, Rosenbaum did not publish this posthumously and it is very likely his publisher made Irving sign a waiver for the interview given Irving's litigiousness) that he is using his audience for his own personal gain and thinks them "an ill-fitting shoe."
In short, the quote is unverifiable and possibly did not take place and the secondhand source for the quote is from an idiot whose dedication requests that the IHR be considered for Nobel Peace Prize. Neither John nor his claims are worth much time to invest in, and I personally feel a bit drained debunking this Quatsch.
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