The British government treated Zionism primarily as a wartime propaganda weapon

Evidence

However, the inclusion of Zionism in British and French plans from early 1917, as the perceived urgency of enlisting Jewish power outweighed concerns about the Jewish place in the future of Western Asia, scuppered the racial unity of the original scheme. Sykes needed a new racial frame to explain the region’s post-Ottoman future and make it work. This would not have been so much of an issue if the Entente only intended to give Jewish nationalism a small, fringe corner of Western Asia. Geographically speaking, this was the case. And constitutionally, the role allotted to Jews, as sketchy as it was, did not even feature independent statehood; the Balfour Declaration specified ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, but the meaning of this terminology was not defined during the war. The precise future of Zionism was not a priority for the British government, who saw Jewish nationalism principally as a weapon of warfare. And yet, ideationally, the British government envisaged a major place for the Jews in the post-Ottoman future—well beyond any political and geographical limits—alongside the Arab nation. In large part, this prominence resulted from the conviction among Entente policy-makers that Jews wielded global political power. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 687

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on how imperial powers instrumentalize minority nationalism as a wartime tool — parallels the use of Arab nationalism and other ‘weapons of warfare’ in the same chapter.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what did Entente policymakers actually believe about ‘Jewish global power’ — which sources fueled this conviction?