#47 The Balfour Declaration and the Palestinian Question
Anti-Semitism had a long history in the 19th century. There had been discussions among a small minority of Jewish peoples of finding land for a nation-state for the Jewish people. Many different options were considered. This long-felt need was given expression in 1917 just at the point in the 1914-18 war when both sides knew they might lose.
The Balfour Declaration was one final consequence of the 1914 war which we need to examine here. It has had a lasting effect and led 30 years later to the state of Israel. Balfour was a prominent British political leader throughout the 1914-18 war. The Declaration was simply a signed intention in 1917 that Palestine would be a land reserved for the Jewish people. It was a strange document to appear in 1917 and has perplexed writers ever since. All sides in the war were desperately struggling; the outcome was far from certain at the point when the declaration was made public. Money to fight the war was short, so too was food, hunger among civilians was real, soldiers on both sides were beginning to refuse orders. So why should Britain sign a solemn declaration about the future of a piece of land they did not control or own?
The document had been very carefully worded, drawn up by senior political Zionist Jews in the USA and Britain. In 1917, anti-Semitism had become normal as I have discussed in previous blogs. There is no evidence that Britain wished to solve the European Jewish anti-Semitism of the time. Jews in the USA often faced violence and serious social exclusion. Despite the anti-Semitism, very senior Jewish political leaders were part of the establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. Jewish owned banks were at the heart of both country’s economies. Britain was borrowing huge amounts of money to fight the war, well beyond what was acceptable in times of peace. It remains unclear why this document appeared in 1917, although it is easy to assume that it was a sop to the banking fraternity. Whatever the explanation, the Declaration was to have far-reaching repercussions.
Despite the careful wording of the Declaration, the welfare of the Arab peoples of Palestine was never considered important. Winston Churchill summed it up in 1937 when giving evidence to the Peel Commission, that:
“He had no more sympathy for the displaced Palestinian Arabs than he had for the American Indians of the Australian aborigines: it was merely the advance of history if a weaker or lower race was supplanted by a stronger one, or as he put it a 'higher grade race'. Churchill’s understanding of Arabs and Jews was directly in accord with the racial ideas of the time.”
- Quoted by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the London Review of Books 13.9.2018, page 15, when reviewing Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East
The final item worth recording is that Palestine had been colonised by the British in 1922. They offered their colonised territory as a home for Jewish people. The human and legal rights of the Arab peoples had never been accepted by either the British or the Zionist coloniser. Both ruled the Arab peoples of Palestine as a colony and as a dictatorship.
These issues are still being hotly debated; as Jeff Halper has recently expressed:
“Is Zionism a legitimate national movement or simply another case of colonialism? For those arguing that Zionism is a valid movement for Jewish national rights, it cannot be a colonial movement, since it is the Jews that are indigenous to the country. “Jewish” rights by definition take precedence over those of Palestinians, whose very existence as a people, and certainly as the indigenous people, is denied. For those casting Zionism as a colonial movement of Eastern Europeans and Russians to take control of another people’s country, it has no “national” legitimacy. Not only is colonialism illegitimate since it violates the fundamental right of self-determination (and, in its form of permanent occupation, in violation of the 1973 International Convention for the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid).”
- In a recent article, (2018) titled Choices Made from Zionist Settler Colonialism to Decolonisation
By 1922, Britain and France had achieved the first part of their war aims and had the whole of the Arabic world under their political control. The Arabic world was divided up into artificial countries, where they remain to this day, part under French and part under British rule (which was lost after 1945). The countries were artificial as, like so much colonial geographical boundary creation, there was minimal knowledge of the history of the region. Modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel are still often referred to by local peoples as greater Syria.
Published in 1732, this map by Ottoman geographer Kâtip Çelebi (1609–57) shows the term ارض فلسطين (ʾarḍ Filasṭīn, "Land of Palestine") extending vertically down the length of the Jordan River. Houghton Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Suggested Reading
Palestine and the Balfour Declaration:
J M N Jeffries, Palestine The Reality; The Inside Story of the Balfour Declaration, 1917-1939. Originally published in 1939 by Longmans Green in London; republished in 2017 by Olive Branch Press. Jeffries was an Irish Journalist reporting on Middle East Affairs during the period of this book. Perhaps the most comprehensive book on the subject.
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Ideology alone was of course not enough for Hitler to rise to power. The question remains: how was Hitler able to revive the German economy sufficiently to fight a global war in a mere six years? Hitler had taken political power in Germany in 1933. Once this question has been asked, the direction of the answer is obvious: the German economy would have to be supported by the great powers, France, Britain or America; there was no other way.