Thread by @MouinRabbani

THREAD: On 2 November 1917, Great Britain issued the Balfour Declaration. The document is of enormous significance because it transformed Zionism from a political aspiration into a credible project.

The First Zionist Congress, convened in the Swiss City of Basel in 1897, recognized that great power sponsorship was vital to the success of Zionism. Thus Article 4 of the Basel Program called for “Preparatory steps for obtaining the governmental approvals necessary for the achievement of the Zionist goal”. For the next two decades, Zionist leaders spent as much effort obtaining imperial sponsorship as they did to promoting what the Basel Program called “The expedient promotion of the settlement of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and businessmen in Palestine”.

In 1917 the Zionist movement finally succeeded. With the Balfour Declaration it achieved the sponsorship of the world’s most powerful state. Issued as a personal letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to the prominent British Zionist Walter Rothschild, it stated in relevant part:

“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 to 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”.

Although it was a personal letter, the Balfour Declaration represented the policy of the British government. While sent under Balfour’s name to Rothschild, historians have speculated that the primary author may not have been Balfour but possibly his cabinet colleague Alfred Milner or Conservative politician William Ormsby-Gore. And although Rothschild was the letter’s recipient, the British government’s main counterpart in drafting the letter was in fact Chaim Weizmann, the president of the British Zionist Federation who would later become Israel’s first president.

The Balfour Declaration, which went through a number of drafts, was the result of two sets of consultations: one within the British government, and a second between the British government and British Jewish leaders, both Zionist and anti-Zionist. The influence of the latter, who opposed Zionism as antithetical to Jewish integration in Europe, can be seen in the Declaration’s final clause.

Although Palestinians at that time constituted some ninety-five per cent of the population of Palestine, not one of them was consulted in the process that led to the Balfour Declaration. This explains both why they are referenced merely as the “existing non-Jewish communities”, and why no reference is made to their political rights.

As Balfour would explicitly admit in a letter to George Curzon in 1919: “The weak point of our position is of course that in the case of Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination.”

As Balfour would further inform Curzon:

“In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American [King-Crane] Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are … The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land … In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate”.

The King-Crane Commission mentioned above, was dispatched to the region by the US government in 1919 to gauge public sentiment about its future. Although initially “predisposed in its favour”, it reached very different conclusions once confronted with reality. With respect to the Balfour Declaration, it noted that if “Jewish national home” meant a state, “the erection of such a Jewish State [cannot] be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission's conferences with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete disposition of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.” It further noted that “No solution which is merely local or has only a single people in mind can avail."

Noting overwhelming Palestinian opposition to Zionism, the Commission presciently observed:

“No British officer, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms. The officers generally thought that a force of not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required even to initiate the program … Decisions requiring armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary. But they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in the interest of a serious injustice.”

As Israel flunkies like to constantly repeat, “The war was started by the Arabs”.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration was but one of three incompatible commitments made by the British during the First World War regarding the future of Palestine. Each of these was promulgated well before the British Mandate commenced in 1922.

The first, known as the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, was a series of letters exchanged in 1915-1916 between Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt (at the time a British protectorate) and the Ottoman-appointed Hashemite Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali (the great-great grandfather of Jordan’s King Abdallah II). The Correspondence set out the terms of a British-Hashemite partnership pursuant to which the Hashemites would rebel against the Ottomans (what became known as the Arab Revolt) and align with London (to the exclusion of France) after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.

In addition to direct assistance to the Arab Revolt, Sharif Hussein on 14 July 1915 demanded that:

“England acknowledge the independence of the Arab countries, bounded on the north by Mersina and Adana up to the 37th degree of latitude, on which degree fall Birijik, Urfa, Mardin, Midiat, Jezirat (ibn ‘Umar), Amadia, up to the border of Persia; on the east by the borders of Persia up to the Gulf of Basra; on the south by the Indian Ocean, with the exception of the position of the [British colony of] Aden to remain as it is; on the west by the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea up to Mersina.”

On 24 October McMahon replies as follows:

“I have realized … from your last letter that you regard as one of vital and urgent importance. I have, therefore, lost no time in informing the Government of Great Britain of the contents of your letter and it is with great pleasure that I communicate to you on their behalf the following statement…

The two districts of Mersina and Alexandretta and portions of Syria lying to the West of the Districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo cannot be said to be purely Arab and should be excluded from the limits demanded.

With the above modification, and without prejudice to our existing treaties with Arab chiefs, we accept those limits.

As for those regions lying within those frontiers wherein Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interest of her ally, France, I am empowered in the name of the Government of Great Britain to give the following assurance and make the following reply to your letter:

1. Subject to the above modifications, Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the Sharif of Mecca.”

The correspondence is worth quoting in detail because both McMahon and Hussein go to considerable length to define the areas that will (and will not) be included in the territory Great Britain will recognize as part of an independent Arab state. For our purposes the relevant details are Hussein’s explicit incorporation of Palestine (“on the West by the Mediterranean Sea”), and Britain’s explicit exclusion of those “portions of Syria lying to the West of the [Ottoman] Districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo”. The latter correspond to Lebanon. In other words, London accepted that Palestine would be included as part of the independent Arab state it would recognize.

The second commitment is known as the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, named after British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French counterpart François Georges-Picot. At around the same time as McMahon was corresponding with Hussein, Britain, France, and Czarist Russia – by this point collectively committed to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire as a war aim – were secretly negotiating its division among themselves.

Given Palestine’s enormous religious significance, Protestant England, Catholic France, and Orthodox Russia agreed that in contrast to the other Ottoman territories no state would exercise sole control over it and that most of its territory would be placed under international administration.

Once Russia’s Czarist regime was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, Britain and France rescinded Russia’s allotment under their agreement. The Bolsheviks promptly responded by making the Agreement public, and published the full text in both Pravda and Izvestia, and it was several days later reproduced by the Manchester Guardian. In subsequent further negotiations between Paris and London, Britain eventually obtained French consent that Palestine would be under exclusive British control.

With the Balfour Declaration by this point also in circulation, the British were compelled to provide Sharif Hussein with not one but two explanations. With regard to Sykes-Picot, a document known as the Bassett Letter dismissed it as Ottoman propaganda designed to drive a wedge between Britain and the Arabs. Responding to Hussein’s demands for clarification regarding the Balfour Declaration, the Hogarth Message, drafted by Mark Sykes on behalf of the British government but delivered to Hussein by David Hogarth, head of London’s Arab Bureau in Cairo, stated the following:

"(1) The Entente Powers are determined that the Arab race shall be given full opportunity of once again forming a nation in the world. This can only be achieved by the Arabs themselves uniting, and Great Britain and her Allies will pursue a policy with this ultimate unity in view.
"(2) So far as Palestine is concerned we are determined that no people shall be subject to another, but
(a) In view of the fact that there are in Palestine shrines, Wakfs and Holy places, sacred in some cases to Moslems alone, to Jews alone, to Christians alone, and in others to two or all three, and inasmuch as these places are of interest to vast masses of people outside Palestine and Arabia, there must be a special regime to deal with these places approved of-by the world.
(b) As regards the Mosque of Omar it shall be considered as a Moslem concern alone and shall not be subjected directly or indirectly to any non-Moslem authority.
(3) Since the Jewish opinion of the world is in favour of a return of Jews to Palestine and inasmuch as this opinion must remain a constant factor, and further as His Majesty’s Government view with favour the realisation of this aspiration, His Majesty’s Government are determined that in so far as is compatible with the freedom of the existing population both economic and political, no obstacle should be put in the way of the realisation of this ideal.”

It was a rather different interpretation than would be given by Balfour in his correspondence with Curzon.

The larger question concerns Britain’s motivations in issuing the Balfour Declaration. There was certainly incessant Zionist lobbying of London over many years, and Balfour and Weizmann were said to be close, but the idea that the Zionist movement forced the Declaration down the throat of the most powerful government on the planet can be safely dismissed.

Traditional explanations have focused on British efforts to mobilize influential Jewish leaders in the United States to assist with the consolidation of the US commitment to the war effort at a time when this was seen as insufficiently assured. Additionally, it was said to have been intended to undermine Jewish support for the revolution in Russia that had just overthrown a regime with a long record of persecuting its Jewish population, and fears that Moscow’s new rulers would withdraw from the generalized European slaughter that had commenced in 1914 – which they indeed would do several months later.

While such considerations may well have played a role, Zionism was during the 1910s still very much a contested if not minority persuasion among both Jewish elites and Europe’s Jews more generally. Indeed, the only Jewish member of the British cabinet, Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu, was an outspoken anti-Zionist. He considered Zionism to be not only a “mischievous political creed” but also an anti-Semitic one. In his August 1917 Memorandum of the Anti-Semitism of the Present [British] Government, in which he laid out his opposition to the circulating drafts of the Balfour Declaration, which he would vote against, he explained his position as follows:

“I assume that it means that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.”

Anti-Semitism, and specifically the desire to see large numbers of eastern European Jews exported from Europe to Palestine, as well as Christian Zionism have also been proposed as rationales for the Balfour Declaration. These too can be seen as no more than contributory factors. While it is true that Balfour was both a Christian Zionist and notorious anti-Semite who had been roundly condemned by the British Jewish establishment in 1905 for his sponsorship of the Aliens Act when he was prime minister, the Declaration was not a personal initiative but government policy, and Balfour may not even have been its primary author.

The suggestion by a prominent British-Israeli historian, Benny Morris, that Balfour was motivated by repentance for his sponsorship of the 1905 legislation that was designed to keep desperate and destitute eastern European Jewish refugees out of Britain, and for European anti-Semitism more generally, is simply absurd. For one, we have no evidence of Balfour renouncing his or any other anti-Semitism between 1905 and 1917.

The most persuasive explanation remains that London was primarily acting in Britain’s rather than Zionism’s interests, and was sponsoring the Zionist movement to serve British imperial policy.

Specifically, in 1915 a combined German-Ottoman expeditionary force launched an attack from southern Palestine across the Sinai Peninsula that managed to reach the Suez Canal, the jugular vein of the British Empire and a vital transportation route between Great Britain and its most important imperial possession, India. Although the attack was ultimately unsuccessful, it exposed a key British vulnerability, and it would be only two years later that British forces finally recaptured Sinai.

It would thereafter take the British almost eight months to capture Gaza, during the Third Battle of Gaza of 1-2 November 1917. As noted by the late journalist Gerald Butt in his 1995 history of Gaza, prior to Israel’s current genocidal campaign and systematic destruction of the Gaza Strip, it had been these three battles that inflicted more damage on Gaza City than any other event in its history.

Gaza City fell to the British on the same day that Balfour published his declaration. The following month General Edmund Allenby marched into Jerusalem and proclaimed martial law. Among his first acts was a prohibition on the publication of the Balfour Declaration, out of recognition that it would set local opinion aflame.

There has been much discussion of the Declaration’s choice of the vague formulation “Jewish national home” to characterize its plan for Palestine. The Zionist movement, not without justification, read this as British endorsement of a Jewish state, and in later years Balfour and other British officials would indicate that this is indeed what they intended.

Yet the more likely explanation is that London initially intended for Palestine to become a British protectorate. Settled with an implanted European population surrounded by Palestinians hostile at their dispossession and an Arab world robbed of the independence of a territory in its very heart, the Zionist project would be thoroughly dependent on London for its very survival, and thus a dependable guardian of the eastern approaches to the Suez Canal.

It is in this respect worth recalling that when Britain finally did relinquish its mandate after the Second World War, it did so unwillingly, its hand having been forced by the combination of bankruptcy and exhaustion after years of another gruelling world war, and the campaign of Zionist terrorism.

When Britian was awarded the Mandate for Palestine in 1922 on the strength of the above machinations, the Balfour Declaration was incorporated into its terms. In the words of Arthur Koestler: “One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”

Needless to say Great Britain had as much right to dispose of Palestine as did Palestine of Great Britain. As for the League of Nations, it was an imperial club that disintegrated in the fires of the Second World War for a reason. Its mandates system had all the legitimacy of the 1884 Berlin Conference that regulated the Scramble for Africa.

Absent the Balfour Declaration, and its imperial sponsorship of a movement until that point incapable of making significant headway on its own, it is quite likely we would today be speaking of Zionism in the past tense if at all.

Can you say Perfidious Albion? END