British Prime Minister Theresa May expects the British public to be proud of one of their most terrible colonial disgraces and to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The then British government promised to support a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, albeit then stating that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
May claims that “it is an anniversary we will be marking with pride.” The reality, as she surely knows, is that the “we” will not include a hefty part of the British population who will be appalled.
Leading Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi has described the Balfour Declaration as “the single most destructive political document of the 20th century on the Middle East.”
This was never a pledge made for the benefit of the Jewish people who had suffered so much, not least in the pogroms of Russia but also in the immediate interests of the British state in the middle of World War I. This was a pledge rooted in both colonialism and anti-Semitism.
Ever since Lord Palmerston in 1840, there were British politicians who hoped to encourage Jews to settle in Palestine and leave Britain. The one Jewish member of the Cabinet in 1917, Edward Montague, wrote that: “I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic and in result will prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country in the world.”
Balfour’s inherent racism was clear. Far from being interested in the welfare of Jews, as prime minister in 1905, he introduced severe immigration controls to prevent a Jewish influx from Eastern Europe. He preferred that the Jews find a home outside of Britain. He was even more contemptuous of Arabs. In 1919, Balfour stated that “in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.”
It is this sort of attitude that allowed the British government to ignore the earlier promises it made to Sharif Hussein of Makkah to create an independent Arab state there.
If Theresa May wants to retain any credibility on the Middle East, she needs to own up to Britain’s heavy historic responsibility. She should reflect on her hostile attitude toward the Palestinians.
Chris Doyle
At the time of the Balfour Declaration, the Arabs constituted around 90 percent of population of Palestine. There were more Christian Arabs than Jews. Britain ignored the political rights of the non-Jews, that of the overwhelming majority. Unsurprisingly, Palestinians rejected this and it brought about the emergence of the Palestinian national movement.
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Categories: Arab World, Europe, Europe and Australia, European Union, The Muslim Times, UK
I, for one, will not be celebrating the Balfour Declaration, as I don’t think that Israel should have been created.
Extracts from a book I am currently reading:
“…..for all at once I knew, with that clarity which sometimes bursts within us like lightning……, that David and David’s time, like Abraham and Abraham’s time, were closer to their Arabian roots – and so to the beduin of today – than to the Jew of today, who claims to be their descendant……”
“And there were the Jews: indigenous Jews, wearing a tarbush and a wide, voluminous cloak, in their facial type strongly resembling the Arabs; Jews from Poland and Russia, who seemed to carry with them so much of the smallness and narrowness of their past lives in Europe that it was surprising to think they claimed to be of the same stock as the proud Jew from Morocco or Tunisia in his white burnus. But although the European Jews were so obviously out of all harmony with the picture that surrounded them, it was they who set the tone of the Jewish life and politics and thus seemed to be responsible for the
almost visible friction between Jews and Arabs.”
“The Jews were not really coming to it (Palestine/Israel) as one returns to one’s homeland; they were rather bent on making it into a homeland conceived on European patterns with European aims. In short, they were strangers within the gates.”.
“In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised the Jews a ‘national home’ in Palestine, I saw a cruel political manoeuvre designed to foster the old principle, common to all colonial powers, of ‘divide and rule’.”.
And it is the white European Zionists who now control Israel.