Theresa May Wants British People to Feel
'Pride' in the Balfour Declaration. What exactly
is there to be proud of?
Balfour initiated a policy of British support
for Israel which continues to this very day, to
the detriment of the occupied Palestinians of
the West Bank and the five million Palestinian
refugees living largely in warrens of poverty
around the Middle East, including
Israeli-besieged Gaza. Surely we should
apologise
By Robert Fisk
March 03, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Independent"
- Theresa May told us that Britain will
celebrate the centenary of the Balfour
Declaration this summer with “pride”. This was
predictable. A British prime minister who would
fawn to the head-chopping Arab autocrats of the
Gulf in the hope of selling them more missiles –
and then hold the hand of the insane new
anti-Muslim president of the United States – was
bound, I suppose, to feel “pride” in the most
mendacious, deceitful and hypocritical document
in modern British history.
As a woman who has set her heart
against immigrants, it was also inevitable that
May would display her most venal characteristics
to foreigners – to wealthy Arab potentates, and
to an American president whose momentary love of
Britain might produce a life-saving post-Brexit
trade agreement. It was to an audience of
British lobbyists for Israel a couple of months
ago that she expressed her “pride” in a
century-old declaration which created millions
of refugees. But to burnish the 1917 document
which promised Britain’s support for a Jewish
homeland in Palestine but which would ultimately
create that very refugee population – refugees
being the target of her own anti-immigration
policies – is little short of iniquitous.
The Balfour Declaration’s intrinsic lie
– that while Britain supported a Jewish
homeland, nothing would be done “which may
prejudice the civil and religious rights of
existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” –
is matched today by the equally dishonest
response of Balfour’s lamentable successor at
the Foreign Office. Boris Johnson wrote quite
accurately two years ago that the Balfour
Declaration was “bizarre”, a “tragicomically
incoherent” document, “an exquisite piece of
Foreign Office fudgerama”. But in a subsequent
visit to Israel, the profit-hunting Mayor of
London suddenly discovered that the Balfour
Declaration was “a great thing” that “reflected
a great tide of history”. No doubt we shall hear
more of this same nonsense from Boris Johnson
later this year.
Although the Declaration itself has
been parsed, de-semanticised, romanticised,
decrypted, decried, cursed and adored for 100
years, its fraud is easy to detect: it made two
promises which were fundamentally opposed to
each other – and thus one of them, to the Arabs
(aka “the existing non-Jewish communities”),
would be broken. The descendants of these
victims, the Palestinian Arabs, are now
threatening to sue the British government over
this pernicious piece of paper, a hopeless and
childish response to history. The Czechs might
equally sue the British for Chamberlain’s Munich
agreement, which allowed Hitler to destroy their
country. The Palestinians would also like an
apology – since the British have always found
apologies cheaper than law courts. The British
have grown used to apologising – for the British
empire, for the slave trade, for the Irish
famine. So why not for Balfour? Yes, but....
Theresa May needs the Israelis far more than she
needs the Palestinians.
Balfour’s 1917 declaration, of course,
was an attempt to avoid disaster in the First
World War by encouraging the Jews of Russia and
America to support the Allies against Germany.
Balfour wanted to avoid defeat just as
Chamberlain later wanted to avoid war. But – and
this is the point – Munich was resolved by the
destruction of Hitler. Balfour initiated a
policy of British support for Israel which
continues to this very day, to the detriment of
the occupied Palestinians of the West Bank and
the five million Palestinian refugees living
largely in warrens of poverty around the Middle
East, including Israeli-besieged Gaza.
This is the theme of perhaps the most
dramatic centenary account of the Balfour
Declaration, to be published this summer by
David Cronin (in his book Balfour’s Shadow:
A Century of British Support for Zionism and
Israel), an Irish journalist and author
living in Brussels whose previous investigation
of the European Union’s craven support for
Israel’s military distinguished him from the
work of more emotional (and thus more
inaccurate) writers. Cronin has no time for
Holocaust deniers or anti-Semites. While rightly
dismissing the silly idea that the Palestinian
Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al Husseini, inspired the
Holocaust of the Jews of Europe, he does not
duck Haj Amin’s poisonous alliance with Hitler.
Israel’s post-war creation as a nation state, as
one Israeli historian observed, may not have
been just – but it was legal. And Israel does
legally exist within the borders acknowledged by
the rest of the world.
There lies the present crisis for us
all: for the outrageous right-wing government of
Benjamin Netanyahu is speeding on with the mass
colonisation of Arab land in territory which is
not part of Israel, and on property which has
been stolen from its Arab owners. These owners
are the descendants of the “non-Jewish
communities” whose rights, according to Balfour,
should not be “prejudiced” by “the establishment
of a national home for the Jewish people” in
Palestine. But Balfour’s own prejudice was
perfectly clear. The Jewish people would have a
“national home” – ie, a nation – in Palestine,
while the Arabs, according to his declaration,
were mere “communities”. And as Balfour wrote to
his successor Curzon two years later, “Zionism …
is … of far profounder import than the desires
and prejudices [sic] of 700,000 Arabs who now
inhabit that ancient land”.
Cronin’s short book, however, shows
just how we have connived in this racism ever
since. He outlines the mass British repression
of Arabs in the 1930s – including extrajudicial
executions and torture by the British army –
when the Arabs feared, with good reason, that
they would ultimately be dispossessed of their
lands by Jewish immigrants. As Arthur Wauchope,
the Palestine High Commissioner, would write,
“the subject that fills the minds of all Arabs
today is … the dread that in time to come they
will be a subject race living on sufferance in
Palestine, with the Jews dominant in every
sphere, land, trade and political life”. How
right they were.
Even before Britain’s retreat from
Palestine, Attlee and his Cabinet colleagues
were discussing a plan which would mean the
“ethnic cleansing” of tens of thousands of
Palestinians from their land. In 1944, a Labour
Party statement had talked thus of Jewish
immigration: “Let the Arabs be encouraged to
move out as the Jews move in.” By 1948, Labour,
now in government, was announcing it had no
power to prevent money being channelled from
London to Jewish groups who would, within a
year, accomplish their own “ethnic cleansing”, a
phrase in common usage for this period since
Israeli historian Illan Pappe (now, predictably,
an exile from his own land) included it in the
title of his best-known work.
The massacre of hundreds of Palestinian
civilians at Deir Yassin was committed while
thousands of British troops were still in the
country. Cronin’s investigation of Colonial
Office files show that the British military lied
about the “cleansing” of Haifa, offering no
protection to the Arabs, a policy largely
followed across Palestine save for the courage
of Major Derek Cooper and his soldiers, whose
defence of Arab civilians in Jaffa won him the
Military Cross (although David Cronin does not
mention this). Cooper, whom I got to know when
he was caring for wounded Palestinians in Beirut
in 1982, never forgave his own government for
its dishonesty at the end of the Palestine
Mandate.
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Cronin’s value, however, lies in his further
research into British support for Israel, its
constant arms re-supplies to Israel, its 1956
connivance with the Israelis over Suez – during
which Israeli troops massacred in the Gaza camp
of Khan Younis, according to a UN report, 275
Palestinian civilians, of whom 140 were refugees
from the 1948 catastrophe. Many UN-employed
Palestinians, an American military officer noted
at the time, “are believed to have been executed
by the Israelis”. Britain’s subsequent export of
submarines and hundreds of Centurion tanks to
Israel was shrugged off with the same
weasel-like excuses that British governments
have ever since used to sell trillions of
dollars of weapons to Israelis and Arabs alike:
that if Britain didn’t arm them, others would.
In opposition in 1972, Harold Wilson claimed it
was “utterly unreal” to call for an Israeli
withdrawal from land occupied in the 1967 war,
adding that “Israel’s reaction is natural and
proper in refusing to accept the Palestinians as
a nation”. When the Palestinians first demanded
a secular one-state solution to Palestine, they
were denounced by a British diplomat (Anthony
Parsons) who said that “a multinational, secular
state” would be “wholly incompatible with our
attitude toward Israel”. Indeed it would. When
the PLO opposed Britain’s Falklands conflict,
the Foreign Office haughtily admonished the
Palestinians – it was “far removed” from their
“legitimate concerns”, it noted – although it
chose not to reveal that Argentine air force
Skyhawk jets supplied by Israel were used to
attack UK forces, and that Israel’s military
supplies to Argentina continued during the war.
A
year later, Margaret Thatcher, according to a
note by Douglas Hurd, included “armed action
against military targets of the occupying power”
as a definition of “terrorism”. So the
Palestinians could not even resist their direct
occupiers without being criminals.
On an official visit to Israel in 1986, Thatcher
said that she regarded discussion of Jerusalem
as “internal politics”. In 2001, Tony Blair’s
government granted 90 arms exports licences to
Israel for “defensive” weapons – including
torpedoes, armoured vehicles, bombs and
missiles. There is much, much more of this in
Cronin’s book, including Blair’s useless and
disgraceful period as “peace” envoy to the
Middle East and the growing business contracts
between British companies and Israeli arms
providers – to the extent that the British army
ended up deploying Israeli-made drones in the
skies of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Outside the EU, Theresa May’s Britain will
maintain its close relations with Israel as a
priority; hence May’s stated desire less than a
month ago to sign a bilateral free trade
agreement with Israel. This coincided with an
Israeli attack on Gaza and a Knesset vote to
confiscate – ie, steal – yet more lands from
Palestinians in the West Bank.
From the day that Herbert Samuel, deputy leader
of the Liberal Party and former (Jewish) High
Commissioner for Palestine, said in the House of
Commons in 1930 that Arabs “do migrate easily”,
it seems that Britain has faithfully followed
Balfour’s policies. More than 750,000
Palestinians were uprooted in their catastrophe,
Cronin writes. Generations of dispossessed would
grow up in the camps. Today, there are around
five million registered Palestinian refugees.
Britain was the midwife of that expulsion.
And this summer, we shall again be exhorted by
Theresa May to remember the Balfour Declaration
with “pride”.
