SOURCE: COLUMBIA DAILY TRIBUNE

BY: GEORGE P. SMITH

On Nov 2, 1917, as British forces were about to capture Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued a declaration: “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 which may 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.” Thus began Britain’s patronage of the Zionist project, without which, as journalist Charles Glass wrote in 2001, “there would not have been an Israel for [Jews], or a catastrophe — nakba in Arabic — for Palestine’s Arab majority.”

The Balfour Declaration reflected in some part the sincere Christian Zionism of Prime Minister David Lloyd George and of Balfour himself. Far more important, however, was the considerable political influence of British Zionists under the able leadership of Chaim Weizmann, and of American Zionists led by Louis Brandeis, a close advisor to President Woodrow Wilson. The last half of 1916 had been a perilous low-point in Britain’s fortunes in World War I; Britain was desperate for allies. Zionists exploited this situation by linking British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine to the belated U.S. decision to enter the war on Britain’s side in April 1917 — a decision Brandeis had argued for. Alison Weir’s study of U.S. engagement with Zionism, Against Our Better Judgment, includes a chapter on this little-known aspect of World War I history.

Britain’s promise to Zionist Jews in 1917 conflicted with its promise to the region’s Arabs in 1915. In a series of letters between British representative Henry McMahon and Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, Britain agreed to support an independent Arab kingdom under Hussein in the Arab Middle East, including Palestine. In return, Hussein undertook to mount a revolt against the Ottoman Empire, a German ally in World War I. The Arab Revolt was launched in June 1916, significantly contributing to Britain’s victory in the region. As Israeli historian Avi Shlaim explains in the new documentary film Independent Jewish Voices: 100 Years After Balfour, “If Britain had lost the war, then she wouldn’t be called on to fulfill any of the promises. And if Britain won the war, then, as Richard Nixon used to say, when we get to this bridge we will double-cross it.”

More than 90 percent of Palestine’s population in 1917 were Arabs (including local Sephardi Jews), but they did not figure in Britain’s policy. As Balfour famously remarked in 1919, the aspirations of Zionist settlers were “of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” The Balfour Declaration was incorporated into Britain’s League of Nations mandate for Palestine, in violation of a mandatory power’s “sacred trust of civilization,” under Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, to promote “the well-being and development” of the native people in its charge. In his study of the mandate period, One Palestine, Complete, Israeli historian Tom Segev details the countless ways in which Britain fostered the Zionist project. Ultimately, in what they call the “War of Independence” of 1947–1949, Zionists expelled 750,000 Palestinians to make way for a Jewish state with an overwhelming Jewish majority on 78 percent of Palestine’s land.

Neither Britain nor Zionists had the right to dictate the fate of Palestine. Even at the time, many Britons denounced the double dealing and contempt for indigenous people that underlay the Balfour Declaration — most prominently J.M.N. Jeffries in 25 dispatches in the London Daily Mail in January and February, 1923. Pointing to a clause in the Declaration, he wrote, “The people of Palestine are referred to as ‘non-Jewish communities.’ …Does Lord Balfour call the British people ‘the non-foreign community in England?’” Today there can be no excuse for celebrating this sordid chapter in settler-colonialist injustice, especially in light of the ongoing nakba: the catastrophe that Palestine’s “non-Jewish communities” continue to suffer in consequence.

George P. Smith is professor emeritus of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri, and a member of Mid-Missourians for Justice in Palestine.