The Balfour
Declaration’s Bitter Fruit
Most people these
days think of the state of Israel as a sort of payback to the Jewish people for
the suffering visited upon them by Adolf Hitler and the awful Nazis during
World War II; never mind that the people of Palestine had nothing to do with
that. Hardly anyone realizes that the
die had already been cast in 1937 for the sort of partition of Palestine
that the United Nations performed in 1948, giving rise to today’s state of
Israel.
That was the year
that Britain’s Peel Commission came up with its
plan to resolve the problem of the growing turbulence resulting from its own
policy of permitting ever growing numbers of Jewish Europeans to settle in the
region. From the beginning of the
British mandate, granting “temporary” governance by the League of Nations in
the wake of World War I over the region ruled for centuries by the Ottoman
Empire, the immigration policy had been
strongly opposed not only by the overwhelmingly Muslim and great-majority Arabs
of the region, but also by the native Arab Christians and the small community
of native Jews.
As Wikipedia
reports, that first partition plan received the same sort of rejection from the
Palestinian Arabs that President Donald Trump’s recent proposal has duly and
predictably received:
The Arabs opposed the partition plan and
condemned it unanimously. The Arab High Committee opposed the idea of a Jewish
state and called for an independent state of Palestine, "with
protection of all legitimate Jewish and other minority rights and safeguarding
of reasonable British interests". They also demanded cessation
of all Jewish immigration and land purchase. They argued that the creation of a
Jewish state and lack of independent Palestine was a betrayal of the word given
by Britain.
The “independent Palestine” they were
talking about at that time was all of it, not just the rump state comprised of
the West Bank and Gaza, which is all they have left now, with the former
riddled with Jewish settlements and the latter suffocated by continued Israeli
control of trade and transportation.
The last sentence of that Wikipedia quote
about the Arab reaction to the Peel Commission’s partition plan goes right to
the heart of extraordinarily powerful 1939 book written by the British
journalist of Irish extraction, J.M.N. Jeffries, entitled Palestine the
Reality: The Inside Story of the Balfour Declaration 1917-1938. The sense of righteous indignation that
Jeffries felt over the blatant betrayal of the solemn word of the British
government to the Palestinian Arabs permeates virtually every page of the book.
Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley state
the matter delicately at the beginning of their chapter entitled “The Palestine
Imbroglio” in their 1992 book, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James
Forrestal:
The question of a Jewish state in
Palestine was one of the most vexing and explosive issues confronting the
American government in the immediate postwar period. It created a conflict between the rational
claims of U.S. national interest and the humanitarian claims of an organized
religious group 6 million of whose members had been
systematically exterminated by Adolf Hitler.
It posed an international diplomatic and a domestic political problem.
The goal of a Jewish state had long
antedated the Holocaust. The World
Zionist Organization had fixed on Palestine before the end of World War I, and
with single-minded determination had exacted from the British government the
Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised “favorable consideration” of a
Jewish homeland in that ancient, barren land; at the same time, however,
the British promised self-government to the Palestinian Arabs. After World War I, Britain held a mandate
from the League of Nations to administer Palestine, to mediate relations
between Arabs and Jews, and to control immigration. (p. 387, emphasis added)
From Jeffries we see, however, that the
British government, yielding to Zionist power as wielded primarily both in
Britain and in the United States, was a good deal worse than just duplicitous:
In the case of Palestine, the excuse is
that we have made promises all round, to Arabs and to Jews, in public and in private. The only common-sense, straightforward course
therefore is to cancel “the lot of them” and to make a new beginning. So runs the plea which is an ignoble in
attitude as it is indefensible in argument.
If there were any basis to it, what a prospect it would open.
Anyone who had repented on a contract
which he had made could slip out of it always, by making another and later
contract or contracts which were incompatible with the previous one. If the person to whom he was contracted
ventured to hold him to their bargain he could go to court, display his
documents, and plead “All these engagements of mine are in contradiction one
with another, “So they are. The court
annuls them all therefore.” What morality and what nonsense!
No, when an individual invokes a plurality
of contracts, or a nation protests a superfluity of treaties or of official
declarations, there is but one means of deciding which of them holds good. Which was the first of them? If that was duly transacted, it is by that
the citizen or the cabinet must adhere.
The Balfour Declaration was issued over
two years after the pact with King Hussein had been made. It is incompatible with this previous pledge
and therefore it is null and void. It
has no more status than have the vows made to a woman before the altar by a man
who has a discarded wife still living.
The best description in fact of the Balfour Declaration is that it is a
bigamous declaration. (p. 196)
The Arabs had it absolutely right in their
reaction to the Peel Commission’s partition proposal. It represented a low-down, dirty, rotten betrayal
by the British of their solemn promises that High Commissioner in Egypt Sir
Henry McMahon had made with King Hussein, the Shereef
of Mecca, in correspondence around the turn of the new year of 1916. “On our part, the essential pledges we made
were clearly and definitely phrased, ‘Great Britain is prepared to recognize
and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories included in
the limits and boundaries proposed by the Shereef of
Mecca.’” (p.91)
“It constitutes the negotiations of a
treaty and the conclusion of a treaty.
The pertinent portions of its text enunciate and then ratify the
terms. It is a treaty. The Shereef of
Mecca described it in his first document as a treaty, and the terms thus
enunciated were accepted. Mr. Lloyd
George himself as Prime Minister acknowledged, and indeed insisted to the
French Government that it had treaty-force.” (p. 90)
Jeffries refers to the correspondence
throughout his book as the McMahon-Hussein Treaty. If you search that term on the Internet, what
comes up the “McMahon-Hussein Correspondence.” You can read the Wikipedia
treatment
of the subject for yourself and see that Jeffries is on very solid ground in
his “treaty” designation.
Book Re-issued
Palestine, the Reality was published at a
very unfortunate time for getting the publicity that it deserved. Longmans and Company brought it out in 1939
just months before the outbreak of World War II. Then most of the copies that Longmans had
printed were destroyed in the blitz of London during the war and the book was
pretty much flushed down the memory hole.
Now we have the good fortune that it has been republished in paperback
in 2017 by Olive Branch Press in the United States and Skyscraper Publications,
Ltd., in the United Kingdom, with an excellent new introduction by the British
Palestinian, Dr. Ghada Karmi. American readers will notice the same sort of
wildly distorted and biased British news coverage of Palestine that she
describes in her introduction:
Jeffries had already observed how the
Zionist case was always given preference, and those who tried to put the
Palestinian one across never “obtained in the newspapers or upon the platform
one thousandth part of the space or of the time which they needed to say all
that they had to say.” The effect of this bias was to leave the other side free
to present its own version of the facts with little opposition, and for the
British public to hear only from sympathetic ministers and from Zionists and
their supporters, and nothing at all from the Arabs. It was already the case, Jeffries points out,
that the Zionist point of view was well represented to the public through the
variety of influential positions held by pro-Zionist Jews in parliament, the
press, and in commerce.
Growing up in the Britain of the 1950s as
I did, that was the situation I faced.
It was virtually impossible to put forth the Palestinian side of the
story. Even the name, “Palestine”, had
gone out of popular usage, and when asked where I came from and I answered,
“Palestine”, people would respond, “did you say Pakistan”? Astonishingly, the name of a new state only
created in 1947, Pakistan, was better known by 1955 than that of Palestine, the
country of the bible, of pilgrimage, and the historical destination of scores
of pious Christian travelers. Everywhere
the concept of my country as the land of the Jews, in which non-Jews were more
like squatters than natives was rife. As
a child, I found it the most frightening deletion of my identity, history and
memory imaginable, further compounded by so profound a British dismissal of our
side of the story as to make me doubt the reality of my own living experience.
Jeffries goes a very long way toward
setting the record straight. Like much
of the legislation that comes down from the United States Congress, the Balfour
Declaration, we learn from him, was not written by the representatives of the
British people in their government. Numerous
Zionist hands were involved in the crafting, with the input from across the
Atlantic in the United States being particularly influential. The finished product, a one-sentence
statement in a November 2, 1917, letter signed by British Foreign Secretary
Arthur Balfour and sent to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish
community, is deceptively simple:
His
Majesty's government view with favour the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will
use their best endeavours to facilitate the
achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be
done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in
any other country.
Wikipedia echoes Jeffries
on the statement’s intentional ambiguity: “The term ‘national home’ had no
precedent in international law, and was intentionally
vague as to whether a Jewish state was contemplated. The intended boundaries of
Palestine were not specified, and the British government later confirmed that
the words ‘in Palestine’ meant that the Jewish national home was not intended
to cover all of Palestine.” And, as
Jeffries puts it (pp. 182-183), “The same culpable lack of definition was in
[the letter’s] preamble, wherein the Declaration was described as ‘a
declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations,’ but no clue was
supplied to these desires. What were
Jewish Zionist aspirations? They were
not identified. How could a British
Government guarantee its sympathy to an enigma?”
The part of the declaration that appears
to safeguard the interests of Palestine’s Arabs is just as bad. This is from page 185 of Jeffries:
Therefore we have Palestine
with 91 percent of its people Arab and 9 percent Jew at the time of the
Declaration. It was an Arab population
with a dash of Jew. Half of the Jews
were recent arrivals.
Before this unpalatable reality, what
did the framers of the Balfour Declaration do? By an altogether abject subterfuge, under colour of protecting Arab interests, they set out to conceal
the fact that the Arabs to all intents constituted the population of the
country. It called them the “non-Jewish
communities in Palestine”! It called the
multitude the nonfew; it called the 670,000 the
non-60,000; out of a hundred it called the 91 the non-9. You might as well call the British people
“the non-Continental communities in Great Britain.” It would be as suitable to
define the mass of working men as “the non-idling communities in the world,” or
the healthy as the “non-bedridden elements amongst sleepers,” or the sane as
“the non-lunatic section of thinkers”—or the grass of the countryside as “the
non-dandelion portion of the pastures.”
The fact of the matter is that the Balfour
Declaration had to be deceptive and dishonest because the people of Britain and
of the world would have been repulsed by what the Zionists intended, had their
aspirations been laid out explicitly.
“It is manifestly impossible to please partisans who officially claim
nothing more than a ‘National Home,’ but in reality will be satisfied with
nothing less than a Jewish State and all that it politically implies” (pp.
374-375), wrote Major General Sir Louis Bols, who,
early on, had been given the impossible task of preserving peace in the
region.
The
intent all along, in spite of the great sacrifices the native Arabs had made in
throwing in their lot with the British in World War I and the solemn promises
of independence that had been made to them, was ultimately for the British
government to adopt the attitude toward them that the Zionists had had all
along, that is that Palestine's original residents really possessed no rights
at all that deserved to be respected. It was as though they were somehow less
than human.
J.M.N. Jeffries saw the disaster shaping
up in 1939. It was already bad enough
for Palestine’s native Arabs at that time, but since then things have grown
almost inconceivably worse for them. The
quote from Dr. Karmi on her Wikipedia page sums the
situation up quite well:
There
is actually nothing — repeat, nothing — positive about the existence of Israel,
as far as the Arabs are concerned. You know, sometimes there are events,
historical events, that happen against people's will. But, in time, they can
find some positive aspect to something they didn't want to happen in the first
place. This is not the case with Israel. On the contrary, as time has gone on,
the existence of Israel has only increased the problems for the Arab region. It
has increased the danger in the Arab world and is a threat not only to the
security of the region, but the security of the whole world.
David Martin
February 19, 2020
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