A CENTURY OF BLOOD
100 years ago, a British statesman at the height of Imperialism paved the way for a Jewish state. But while Israel’s proved to be a remarkable nation — and democracy — its creation has provoked a string of wars and hatreds still tearing apart the Middle E
AHUNDRED years ago this week, Britain’s Foreign Secretary signed a short statement that changed the world. The Balfour Declaration, as it is known today, was just 67 words long. Written on the orders of the Conservative politician Arthur Balfour in the autumn of 1917, it was sent to the banker and zoologist Lord rothschild, a leading light in the British Zionist movement, which sought the establishment of a Jewish homeland.
For the first time, Britain committed itself to ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.
No wonder Israel and its supporters were celebrating this week, marking the anniversary of a foundational moment in their brave little country’s struggle for survival. But there is another side to the story. The Balfour Declaration ignited a firestorm of controversy and violence that saw an entire people — the Palestinians — uprooted from their homes and condemned to life in squalid refugee camps.
The Declaration was at once the cornerstone of the Middle East’s most enduring democracy, and the death warrant for a historic nation. For the Jews of Europe, it offered salvation. For the Palestinians of the Levant, it meant disaster.
Since its publication in 1917, thousands of people have fought and died in an attempt to resolve those contradictions.
And while the Declaration undoubtedly represents a seminal moment in the life of our great friend, Israel, it is also a terrible warning of the dangers of imperial hubris. For a century on, the Palestinian people are still paying a huge price for Balfour’s cynicism.
The background to the Balfour Declaration is almost as controversial as its consequences. To cut a very long story short, at the turn of the 20th century, the land we know today as Israel was part of the crumbling Ottoman Empire (the core of which became modern Turkey).
Then called Palestine, it was dominated by Arabic- speaking Muslims. But in the years before the outbreak of World War I, tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants began arriving from Eastern Europe.
Fleeing appalling pogroms in the russian Empire, they belonged to the Zionist movement, which dreamed of rebuilding the original kingdom of Israel. As one settler put it, the goal was to ‘restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years’.
Against this background, Arthur Balfour came in.
Born into the aristocratic Cecil dynasty in 1848, he was a faintly effeminate figure, known to friends as ‘Niminy Piminy’.
BESIDES being a politician, he was also the author of a book on philosophy and cultivated an air of careless indolence, famously remarking that ‘nothing matters very much and few things matter at all’. But he was enviably well connected, and served as an ineffective Prime Minister between 1902 and 1905.
After the voters kicked him out, Balfour remained at Westminster and was made Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George’s wartime Coalition.
And in November 1917, hoping to stir up international opinion against the Ottomans — who had taken the Germans’ side in World War I — he issued his famous Declaration.
It reads, in full: ‘ 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.’
On the face of it, the statement could hardly have been simpler. But for every word, thousands would lose their lives.
So why did Balfour do it? After all, Britain did not even control Palestine, so he was giving away territory that actually belonged to somebody else.
The obvious explanation is that with Britain fighting the Ottoman Empire, Balfour saw the Declaration as a way to arouse Jewish support.
As historian Jonathan Schneer has argued, Balfour and his colleagues believed in the power of ‘international Jewry’ and were convinced that the Declaration would win them the support of ‘Jewish bankers’ across the world.
Indeed, Balfour himself predicted that the Declaration would make great ‘propaganda both in russia and America’, which were both our
allies in the Great War. But there were three colossal problems. The first, and most obvious, was that somebody else was living in Palestine already: namely, some 737,000 Muslim or Christian Arabs.
They had been there for centuries, tilling the land, raising their families and going about their business.
Nobody asked what they thought. The second problem was Balfour was inexcusably vague. He talked of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’. What did that mean? Would the whole of Palestine become a Jewish state?
Would there be two states, one for Jews, one for Arabs? or would the Jews just get a home within the existing state?
The world is still wrestling with these questions today. Thirdly, and most unforgivably, the Balfour declaration was not the only promise that Britain’s politicians made.
They had already told the leaders of the Arab Revolt — a Britishbacked nationalist uprising led by the Sharif of Mecca against the region’s ottoman overlords — that they would get Palestine as part of a massive Arab-speaking empire after the war.
At the same time, the British had also signed a secret deal with the French to carve up Palestine between them. In fact, when World War I was over, Balfour and Co grabbed Palestine for themselves under a so- called League of Nations Mandate which transferred control of vast areas of the Middle East to the war’s victors.
The French were fobbed off with Syria and Lebanon while Britain snapped up oil- rich Iraq and Palestine.
It is too glib to blame all the modern Middle East’s problems on Britain’s mapmakers, as the self-loathing, anti-Western Left likes to do. Even so, there has rarely been a more flagrant example of imperial hubris.
For what followed was a disastrous mess. By 1929, inspired by the Balfour declaration, some 100,000 Jews had joined their brethren in British-run Palestine, dreaming of a new homeland. The local Arabs took this very badly, and in 1936 launched an unsuccessful uprising against British rule. But by now the eyes of the world were elsewhere.
In 1933 Hitler came to power in Germany, launching the most sickening campaign of hatred and persecution in human history, which culminated in the industrialised slaughter of the Holocaust.
Even as European countries hesitated to accept refugees from Nazi Germany, relief organisations, aided by donations from Jewish groups in America, brought thousands across the Mediterranean Sea to Palestine.
So even as Europe’s Jewish population was being exterminated, the reality of a Jewish homeland was gaining momentum. Between 1931 and 1945, the number of Jews in Palestine swelled to a staggering 608,000 people, accounting for about a third of the population. Balfour himself was long gone, having died in 1930 at the age of 81. But as a result of the declaration, his legacy for the Palestinians was bloody indeed.
After the war, as hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors flooded into Palestine, Zionist groups launched a terror campaign against British occupiers, including the 1946 bombing of Jerusalem’s King david Hotel, which killed 91 people.
In 1948, under pressure from the Americans, Britain pulled out. The Jewish leadership proclaimed the state of Israel, while four neighbouring Arab countries — Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq — sent in their own armies to help the Palestinians.
After ten months of bitter fighting, the Arab armies were thoroughly routed. By the spring of 1949, the Israelis were left in control of the vast majority of what had previously been Palestine, with the Arabs confined to enclaves in Gaza and on the west bank of the River Jordan.
This result is seen by most Israelis as marking the proud birth of their modern state. The Palestinians, however, know it as al-Nakba — ‘the catastrophe’.
In the war and its aftermath, some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes.
Among dozens of massacres, the most infamous came at deir yassin on April 9, 1948, where Jewish militiamen shot, raped and mutilated some 107 Palestinian villagers, including women and children.
The list of conflicts since 1948 includes the Suez War of 1956, when the Israelis joined Britain and France in attacking Colonel Nasser’s Egypt; the Six-day War of 1967, in which the Israelis completely crushed Egypt, Syria and Jordan, taking over Sinai, Gaza and the West Bank; and the october War of 1973, where Egypt and Syria launched a successful surprise attack on Israel which eventually ended in stalemate.
on top of all that, there have been two full-scale wars in Lebanon, two massive Palestinian uprisings and various Israeli incursions into the Palestinian territories in Gaza and the West Bank.
Countless thousands of people have lost their lives. And to pile tragedy upon tragedy, every year has seen new victims added to the list, whether Palestinians killed by Israelis or Israelis killed by Palestinians.
Perhaps no conflict of modern times has generated so much hatred and anguish, or appeared so utterly intractable despite the efforts of generations of international statesmen and women.
Every detail is contested, and the anniversary of the Balfour declaration itself is no exception.
Earlier this week, Boris Johnson claimed that it was ‘indispensable to the creation of a great nation’, and said he was ‘proud of Britain’s part in creating Israel’.
This is surely fair enough. Like all nations, Israel has its faults. I find it hard to defend its government’s harsh treatment of the defeated Palestinians, or its callous, cynical policy of expanding Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
YET for much of the past 70 years, Israel has been the Middle East’s only functioning democracy and a staunch ally to Britain.
And after all the Jews have suffered in the past millennium — pogroms, persecution and the unspeakable obscenity of the Holocaust — what reasonable person would begrudge them a homeland of their own?
What decent person can possibly question Israel’s right to exist, free from the threat of terrorism or invasion? And who would want to see its 8.6 million people driven into the sea, as Islamist or hardLeft propaganda often demands?
yet as Mr Johnson also remarked, it is impossible to avoid being ‘deeply moved by the suffering of those affected and dislodged by its birth’.
For while no sensible person would want to see the Israeli people cast out, that was precisely what happened to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the late Forties.
In Britain, the tragedy of the
conflict is often reduced to simplistic statements. You can usually find people on the Right muttering darkly about Palestin-ian terrorism and siding with the Israelis, while card-carrying Left-wingers often talk as though Israel is the fount of all evil.
I find it very sad to see suppos-edly intelligent people reduced to gibbering zealots, particularly on the high-minded, pseudo-intel-lectual Left.
Only this week, for example, the usual suspects — academics, actors, trade unionists — put their names to a typically sim-plistic, virtue-signalling appeal in the Guardian for the British government to apologise for the Declaration and its aftermath.
Yet it seems clear to me, as it probably does to most people, that the story of Israel and the Palestinians is a tragic one, with no monopoly on grievance or virtue, and no obvious solution.
What Mr Johnson calls the ‘mir-acle of Israel’, a nation founded on ‘ hard work, self-reliance and an audacious and relentless energy’, is real enough.
If that were the only result of the Balfour Declaration, then Britain would be justified in feeling proud of itself.
But that isn’t the whole story. For the Declaration also bequeathed a legacy of suffering and slaughter which has poisoned Middle Eastern politics, inflamed Arab opinion and fuelled Islamist extremism for decades.
And it has also poisoned British politics. You only have to listen to the hard Left today — which is, of course, enjoying a terrifying renaissance — to realise how they exploit the conflict to perpetuate the most disgusting anti-Semitic stereotypes, even caricaturing Israelis as latter-day Nazis.
How sad, and how telling, that their puppet Jeremy Corbyn, so happy to consort with the IRA in its bloodthirsty pomp, refused to attend an anniversary dinner with Israel’s Prime Minister this week — yet somehow found the time to attend an event organised by the Muslim group MEND, which has been accused of host-ing Islamist preachers with ‘extremist and intolerant views’.
Alas, this is par for the course in today’s Labour Party, which has conspicuously failed to tackle a dramatic and frankly chilling upsurge in anti-Semitism among its Left-wing activists.
In the demonology of the Left, there has always been a special place for the Jews.
And yes, I know the Corbynis-tas claim to be talking about ‘ Zionists’ — who specifically believe in the existence a Jewish state — not ‘Jews’, but we all know who they really mean.
It is too glib to blame all the ills of the modern Middle East on the West, as so many Left- wing commentators lazily do.
But there is no doubt Balfour, by meddling in matters he barely understood, unleashed decades of conflict.
What a tragedy that his succes-sors — men such as Sir Anthony Eden, Tony Blair and George W. Bush — refused to learn the lessons of his hubris.
The truth, which too many people fail to understand, is that some problems have no easy answers. Sometimes it is better just to leave well alone.
So perhaps there is only one sensible way to mark the cente-nary of a message that sparked so much hope, caused so much suffering and changed the course of history.
Activists and armchair experts should stop waving the tattered rags of their own virtue, stop pre-tending they have the solutions to all the world’s problems, and stop using the suffering of others as a chance to parade their own second-hand principles.
But if they haven’t learned that lesson in the past hundred years, I suppose there is not much chance they will change now.