In his second Chapter, titled "A contract with Jewry" he holds that British backing of the Zionists during WWI, culminating in the Balfour Declaration of November, 1917, actually stemmed out of the anti-semetic view that Jews control the world and it would best be to placate them so that they make the war go the British way. Here is a quote from the first paragraph of the second chapter:
"The British entered Palestine to defeat the Turks; they stayed to keep it from the French; then they gave it to the Zionists because they loved "the Jews" even as they loathed them. They were not guided by strategic considerations, and there was no orderly decision-making process. The same factors were at work when they issued the Balfour Declaration, their proclamation of support for Zionist aspirations in Palestine. The declaration was the product of neither military nor diplomatic interest but of prejudice, faith and sleight of hand. The men who sired it were Christian and Zionist and, in many cases, antisemetic. They believed that the Jews controlled the world." (Segev;1999: 33)
Segev may be overplaying it a bit in the chapter, but he is pretty convincing...and it is interesting to see how, at least from the picture that Segev shows, Chaim Weizmann knowingly played his cards perfectly by using this assumption on the part of the British, of Jewish world control, to make himself look much more powerful than he really was.
It just seemed to me there are some resonances with this in the present day and the present discussion...
Bryan