A 100 years of misery. This is what the infamous Balfour Declaration created and because of it, the Palestinians were forced out of the lands and made into hundreds of thousands of stateless refugees, strung out and stuttered across the Arab region and the world into abject dispossession and beguiling poverty. Literally overnight, up to 750,000 and maybe more, Palestinians were driven out of their land through Zionists and Jewish terrorism on those bleak days of 1948 while the world helplessly looked on — or more to the point, turned its back on — one of the major catastrophes of mankind.
It was the then British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour who finally made the evil deal through his 67-word letter to Lord Rothschild about British commitment to a Jewish national home as if the British government “owned” Palestine back in 1917, and to do what it would like with the country. It was an incredible commitment to give something that you don’t “own”, but you think you “own” as if it was part of an a la carte menu. I don’t think anything quite on this scale has been done before that is so blunt, cold, calculated, judgemental, arrogant, colonial and imperialistic.
In the age of empires and great powers, one can just maybe, understand, the “give away” mentality, if the area, colony, or piece of land had been under the tutelage of someone else. Palestine had not been directly under British rule, regardless of the meddling, the spheres of influence and the carving up of the Arab world between Britain and France as underlined by the Sykes-Picot secret agreement and all the rest of it. Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire and had been so for under hundreds of years, with 90 per cent of its population comprising Arabs and Muslims and a few Christians, and only 10 per cent Jews.
Balfour and the David Lloyd George government wanted to change all that, showing blatant disregard for the people there, as they, themselves admitted on numerous occasions, and stating the people who lived there don’t really matter, as if they were not part of the equation and that “Zionism ... is ... of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices [sic] of 700,000 Arabs who inhabit that ancient land”.
This was ethnic cleansing par excellence. The Jewish paramilitary gangs and terror groups may have orchestrated the final bloodbath and the massacres of Palestinians of the 1940s, but it was surely done with British connivance that goes back to the Balfour Declaration and the implementation of the British mandate over Palestine, which it received a couple of years later from the League of Nations.
Much has been echoed on the Balfour Declaration and there is much discussion and debate today on that particular historical area with that “letter” written on November 2, 1917. But the fact of the matter is that the tone of the letter continues to be deluding and deceitful with an element of hoodwinking — showing the true face of British diplomacy at the time that sought to double-deal foreign policy, while being on the side of Zionists and only paying lip-service to the Arabs. There is no doubt that there was a clear attempt to make the wheels of history turn in the other direction by an imperial British power that wanted to back a Jewish-Zionist horse because it believed in powerplay with the Jews and not with Arabs.
Keeping aside the “mayhem” that had been done to Palestinians and Arabs with the then British high commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, in December 1928 calling the Balfour Declaration as a “colossal blunder”, analysts then and now, still contemplate on why the British did it. The favourite view, though by no means the major one, is that it was great-power rivalry. The British wanted to maintain the upper hand against the other great powers such as France and Russia. It was beginning to experience “fatigue” and could no longer dictate the outcome of the First World War. It believed the Jews, who had great influence in Russia, Germany and America were in a position to influence their governments to come with an amicable agreement that would satisfy all parties.
Other writers of the time and people that are in-the-know go even further and suggest it was the Zionists who manipulated the British and not the other way round, with talks and speeches delivered on the subject noteably by an American called Benjamin Freedman, who is himself a Jew but converted to Christianity. He stated numerous times in the early 1960s, and his speeches can be heard on social media, that the Zionists had gone to the British government and told it that it could pressure the Americans and the then United States president, Woodrow Wilson, to come out of their “isolationist” foreign policy stand and help Britain win the First World War.
Incredible as it may seem, Freedman said this is what happened. Through Jewish influence on the economy and the media, much of the Jews came from Germany, who also had a stranglehold in Germany, persuaded the US government and Wilson to enter the War, reshuffled the cards and made sure Britain defeated the Germany — a country that was winning and was expected to come out victorious as France had already been defeated and Russia was pulling back its troops who were in disarray.
Having secured American entry into the war, the Zionists, including Chaim Weizmann, originally from Russia, reared in London, and became Israel’s first president in 1949, set about demanding their “pound of flesh” from the British. This was translated into the Balfour Declaration, a “guarantee” of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. While many fudged the issue and suggested a “national homeland” meant just that, emphasising the vagueness of the term, there was no doubt in the minds of those concerned that a national homeland meant a Jewish state, with all the baggage of Palestinian misery that it subsequently created.
Marwan Asmar is a commentator based in Amman. He has long worked in journalism and has a PhD in Political Science from Leeds University in the UK.
