Table of Contents
Introduction
One-hundred years ago today, the famous—or infamous—“Balfour Declaration” was issued by the government of Great Britain. While most people with basic knowledge about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have heard of this document, few understand what it really was, why it is so significant, and why it remains so relevant today.
The main reason for this lack of understanding among the public is that the history taught in the United States and other Western countries systematically misrepresents the conflict’s historical origins. The US government and mainstream media present a narrative lifted wholesale from Israeli propaganda about how the “Jewish state” came into existence, while the Palestinian perspective is hardly acknowledged.
Reflecting this deeply ingrained prejudice against the Palestinians, British Prime Minister Theresa May earlier this week glorified the Balfour Declaration by proclaiming, “We are proud of the role that we played in the creation of [the] state of Israel and we will certainly mark the centenary with pride.”[1]
The Balfour Declaration, however, is no cause for celebration among the Palestinians, who fully grasp its true significance. Acting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in July spoke about suing Britain over the Balfour Declaration by observing, accurately, that it determined a course of policy that ultimately culminated in over 700,000 Arabs being ethnically cleansed from their homes in Palestine.[2]
After the First World War, under the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, Britain was appointed to rule over the conquered territory of the former Ottoman Empire. The Mandate actually incorporated the language of the Balfour Declaration, which determined the nature of Great Britain’s rule over Palestine’s inhabitants. While freed from the yoke of Turkish rule, the Palestinians were even more oppressed under Britain’s occupation regime.
The basic premise of British policy under the Mandate was that the right of the majority Arab inhabitants to self-determination must be denied in order for Palestine to be reconstituted as a “Jewish State”. Under the Mandate, it was to the organized Zionist movement that the British pledged their active support, with great prejudice toward the rights of the Arabs, despite meaningless rhetoric to the contrary.
British policymakers understood that the Zionists aimed to disenfranchise and, ultimately, to displace Arabs from the land, but this was cause for no concern—at least, not at first. Over time, however, British officials became perplexed at what they perceived as Arab ingratitude toward their benevolent rule, as represented by their unwillingness to accept Britain’s rejection of their right to self-determination. While there were those Arabs willing to collaborate with the British regime, the Arab leadership consisted mostly of “extremists” who insisted upon independence and democratic governance.
The British policy of supporting the Zionist project naturally led to unrest among the Arab population. Outbreaks of violence began to occur. As the conflict caused by its guiding policy escalated, the British sought to extract themselves from the situation. So, in 1947, Britain turned to the United Nations, which had taken over the international trusteeship system for territories held under Mandate by the defunct League of Nations.
The solution the UN came up with to resolve the conflict was to partition Palestine into two separate states: one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. The famous UN “Partition Plan”, however, was inherently inequitable and, in fact, was premised on the same rejection of Palestinians’ rights that underlay British policy.
The Arabs naturally refused to consent to this abuse, and the partition plan was never implemented. So the Zionist leadership had to resort to other means. War broke out and, in order to establish their demographically “Jewish state”, the Zionist forces ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their homes. This “compulsory transfer” of Arabs had first been proposed by a British commission of inquiry in 1937, since which the idea became central to the thinking of the Zionist leadership.
The Balfour Declaration’s significance is that it set British policy on a course grounded in a fundamental rejection of the rights of the Arab Palestinians. This rejection of their rights ultimately manifested in a crime that was not unforeseen: the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine.
It this fundamental rejection of Palestinians’ rights that remains the underlying root cause of the conflict that persists to this day.
I. The Conquest of Palestine
Zionist Influence on British Policy
In the late 1800s, the Zionist movement arose for the purpose of establishing a state for the Jewish people. The recognized “father” of modern political Zionism, Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, outlined the project in Der Judenstaat, or The Jewish State, published in 1896. While several territories were considered for the location of this future state, the most logical, given the Jews’ historical connection to it, was Palestine.
There was just one problem: Palestine was already inhabited, and the people already living in and cultivating the land might not look too favorably upon the idea of it being so reconstituted.
Herzl offered no acknowledgement in Der Judenstaat of the existence of the predominantly Arab population of Palestine.[3] He had, however, already considered how the land’s inhabitants were to be dealt with. The prior year, in 1895, he had written in his diary:
We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border, by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.[4]
Toward that end, in 1901, the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, established the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the main purpose of which was to acquire land in Palestine to be held as the “inalienable” property of the Jewish people.
Financing land purchases would prove no obstacle. However, the existence of the Arab population would. It was a dubious assumption, indeed, that they would simply surrender their rights and accede to their own political disenfranchisement and alienation from the land.
Furthermore, Palestine was at that time under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.
What the Zionists therefore needed was guns. They had as of yet no army of their own, so hired guns would have to do.
The Zionists needed the backing of a military power capable of conquering Palestine and establishing the necessary regime to enable the Zionist project to proceed. Hence, the Zionists appealed to European governments for support, and particularly that of Great Britain, offering their own services in exchange.
In advertising their services, the Zionists appealed to the racist and colonialist tendencies of British policymakers. In Der Judenstaat, Herzl argued that a Jewish state in the place of Palestine would serve as “an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism” and help safeguard the “sanctuaries of Christendom”.[5]
What was lacking in Herzl’s day, though, was a pretext for their hired gun to engage in the necessary military adventurism. It was the advent of the Great War that presented the Zionist leadership with the opportunity they were looking for to advance their aims.
Specifically, the entrance of the Ottoman Empire into the war in October 1914, against the side of Great Britain and the other Allied Powers, presented them with their opening.
Once Britain was at war with the Ottoman Turks, the Zionists began heavily lobbying British government officials, attempting to sway them to support their colonization project. Politicians whose favor they elicited included future Prime Minister Lloyd George, future High Commissioner of Palestine Herbert Samuel, Chief Secretary of the War Cabinet Mark Sykes, and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour.
In a 1915 memorandum, Herbert Samuel expressed his agreement with the Zionists’ plan, writing that, with “the British annexation of Palestine”, it would be possible to “plant 3 or 4 million European Jews” on Middle Eastern soil. Leading Zionist Chaim Weizmann counted Mark Sykes among “our greatest finds”, for it was Sykes “who guided our work into more official channels.” By 1916, Weizmann felt confident that the British War Cabinet was “not only sympathetic toward the Palestinian aspirations of the Jews, but would like to see these aspirations realized”.[6]
Chaim Weizmann appealed to one sympathizer in 1916 by arguing that, “should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence, and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in 20 to 30 years a million Jews out there—perhaps more; they would … form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.”[7]
In another letter, Weizmann argued that with the success of the Zionist project, Britain “would have in the Jews the best possible friends, who would be the best national interpreters of ideas in the eastern countries and would serve as a bridge between the two civilizations.”[8]
The government of France, too, Weizmann later noted in his book Trial and Error, was persuaded to let the territory fall under British rather than French control, to further “the development of Jewish colonization in Palestine”.[9]
European policymakers’ support for Zionism was not only dependent on their prejudicial attitudes towards Arabs and Muslims. Another deciding factor was European anti-Semitism. The prospect of Jews flocking out of Europe and into Palestine was met with great enthusiasm by Western governments.
This reality was reflected in the report of a joint British-American committee published in 1946, in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust. The Report of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry regarding the problems of European Jewry and Palestine commented how laws in most European countries barred Jewish refugees from entry, but that, in Palestine, they might “receive a welcome denied them elsewhere.” Even if immigration laws were to be relaxed in Europe, this would take time, and enabling mass emigration of Jews from Europe to Palestine would “have a most salutary effect upon the whole situation.”
With Western governments being unwilling to take in the Jewish refugees themselves, the committee lectured the Arabs to accept “the admission of these unfortunate people into Palestine”, adding that, if the Arabs “cannot see their way to help, at least they will not make the position of these sufferers more difficult.”[10]
The third major motive for the British to support the Zionist project was to secure Jewish support for the war effort. However, the British had a conflicting need to also secure the support of the Arabs, including those then living under Turkish rule. British policymakers, disregarding any future problems it might create, set out to do both.
Promises of Arab Independence
Under the Ottoman Empire, the territory known colloquially as “Palestine” was a part of the broader region known as “Syria”. Palestine was comprised of three districts between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Northernmost was the Sanjak of Acre, which lay westward of the Sea of Galilee and south of the Sanjak of Beirut. South of Acre was the Sanjak of Nablus. South of Nablus and westward of the Dead Sea lay the Sanjak of Jerusalem.[11]
To secure Arab support for their war effort against the Ottoman Empire, in June 1915, Britain issued a proclamation assuring that one outcome of an Allied victory would be independence for the peoples of Egypt, the Sudan, and the Arabia Peninsula.[12]
One Arab leader who responded positively too that message was the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi. Of the ruling Hashemite family, Hussein was given the stewardship of the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which lay within a strip of territory along the Red Sea in the Arabian Peninsula known as the Hejaz. Within modern day Saudi Arabia, the Hejaz was at the time a province of the Ottoman Empire.
Interpreting the proclamation as a British promise to support “the independence of the Arab countries”, on July 14, 1915, Sharif Hussein wrote a letter to the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, intimating his willingness to side with Britain in the war.
Hussein’s interpretation, however, went beyond the territory Britain had in mind, since “the Arab countries” would include Palestine, where the British government was already determined to establish a prolonged occupation regime. In light of Britain’s territorial designs on the region, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, replied that any discussion of specific boundaries was premature.
Sharif Hussein took McMahon’s letter as inferring “an estrangement” between them. Representatives of the Syrian Nationalist Committee at the same time communicated that if Britain would not assure their independence, they would side with Germany in the war. However, cognizant of Britain and France’s mutual aim of territorial conquest, the Syrian committee indicated that, while the independence of “the Syrian interior” was non-negotiable, they would be willing to sacrifice the “Syrian coast”.
On October 24, 1915, McMahon wrote back to Hussein, expressing his “regret” that Hussein had perceived estrangement between them. Seeing the need to be slightly more forthcoming about the territory within which Great Britain would tolerate the Arabs exercising independence, McMahon disclosed Britain’s territorial designs on “the portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo”.
Directly west of those Syrian districts lay the Sanjak of Beirut, where Lebanon is today, which was north of the districts that comprised Palestine along the Mediterranean coast.
The Arabs of Palestine therefore took McMahon’s letter to mean that they, too, would gain their independence if they supported the British war effort. Under the same impression, Sharif Hussein declared himself ruler of the Hashemite Kingdom of Hejaz and in June 1916 declared war against the Turks.[13]
“King Hussein called upon all the Arab territories to take their share,” the report of a British commission of inquiry later noted, “and volunteers from Palestine were among the first to join in a revolt which had a single end in view—the independence of the Arab lands, including Palestine.”[14]
Meanwhile, however, Britain and France, in consultation with Russia, had conspired to divvy up their anticipated territorial conquests. In May 1916, they came to a secret understanding that “Palestine, with the Holy Places, is to be separated from Turkish territory and subjected to a special regime to be determined by agreement between Russia, France and Great Britain.”[15]
This scheme is today known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, after the officials who negotiated it: British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French counterpart Francois Georges-Picot. The agreement remained a secret until the following year, when the Bolshevik government in Russia revealed its existence. After the overthrow of Russian Tsar Nicholas II and seizure of power by Vladimir Lenin in October 1917, the agreement was found in the government’s archive records. To expose Britain and France’s plot, the communist government published the agreement in Izvestia on November 24, 1917—just weeks after Britain issued the Balfour Declaration.[16]
Underlying Britain’s maneuvers and conspiracies throughout this time were the lobbying efforts of the Zionist Organization.
