Time to atone for its sins

RIYAD Al-Malki, Palestinian minister of foreign affairs, speaking at what turned out to be a poorly attended Arab League Summit in Mauritania earlier this week, said that Palestinian officials planned to sue Britain for its issuance of the Balfour Declaration almost a hundred years ago. The infamous declaration was released on Nov. 2, 1917 in the form of a letter from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Walter Rothschild, then a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain. As anyone even just mildly versed in Middle Eastern studies would know, the Balfour Declaration is matched in its infamy only by the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

But whereas the joint British-French document sought to regroup the map of the Fertile Crescent in response to the geopolitical interests of these two colonial powers, the Balfour Declaration had a more sinister goal in mind: No less than the grafting of a Jewish state on a land already inhabited for millennia by another people. The British government, the document asserted, viewed “with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national Jewish homeland.” The underhand term, national Jewish homeland, clearly referred to a “Jewish state.”

That was bad enough — especially when you consider that the Balfour Declaration was composed and released behind the Palestinian people’s back and without their knowledge or approval — but what is worse, and utterly mortifying, for the native people of that ancient land, was the caveat that followed, “... it being understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

Say what now? The existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine? The native sons of the land are such a lower species of men and women they are undeserving of a name, say, Palestinians?

In Mauritania, Al-Malki berated Britain, and the imperial hauteur inherent in its generous promises to European Jews, for all the crimes of Zionism — pre- and post-1948. “Based on this ill-omened promise,” his incompetent translator had him saying in English, “hundreds of thousands of Jews were moved from Europe and elsewhere to Palestine at the expense of the Palestinian people, whose parents and grandparents had lived for thousands of years on the soil of their homeland.” The planned lawsuit will be filed in an international court. Are Palestinian officials for real? Are they serious about suing Britain? Well, they seem to be, and why not? It would’ve seemed quaint, even irrelevant, to dredge up the Balfour Declaration now were it not for the fact that the document, from its inception, sowed dragons’ teeth in Palestine, as the British government took action seemingly to prevent strife, but ended up actually bringing it about. You cannot promise one people a “national homeland” — read, state — that belongs to, and has for centuries been inhabited by, another people without not only planting the seed of conflict there, but also committing a historic and morally egregious injustice. For how can you create a Jewish state in a land already inhabited by an overwhelming majority of non-Jews unless your project was conditioned on the expulsion and finally land alienation of those “non-Jews”? And the ethnic cleansing of major Palestinian population centers in Palestine in 1948, at the hands of armed Jewish gangs, in particular in places like Lydda and Ramleh, would attest to that. But what happened in Britain then, almost a hundred years ago, that is, when the country was in its colonial heyday, is happening in the US today. British Jews in those days, like their American counterparts today, represented an educated, wealthy and influential community that wielded a lot of that education, wealth and power — in short, political muscle — to gain the maximum it could for the Zionist experiment in Palestine. As the distinguished Scottish author, John Keay, wrote in his book, Sowing the Wind (2003), about the Jewish community’s skill at lobbying British officials around that time: “Variously estimated at 60,000 to 80,000, of whom about half were first generation settlers, Palestine’s Jews belied their modest numbers in that they were but the tip of the now worldwide Zionist iceberg. The weakness of their case was offset ... by the worldwide Jewish community and promoted by an international apparatus of powerful patrons, wealthy benefactors and very persuasive negotiators.” By 1948, Britain, having lost its colonies around the world, was already shrinking into a little island nation — and Zionists moved house and home to the US. But the seed of conflict it had planted in Palestine on Nov. 2, 1917 continues to this day to be harvested by the Palestinians. And if these people’s leaders manage to file their lawsuit, and be heard in court, perhaps Britain, a country that has more yesterdays than tomorrow as it shrinks further and further in our lifetime, will find it appropriate to apologize to the people of Palestine. Britain cannot right the wrong it committed against them so long ago, but it can express contrition for having committed it in the first place.