Celebrating the denial of ethnic cleansing
“It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries – all of them. Not one village, not one tribe, should be left!” (Emphasis added).
“Transfer” was and is Zionism’s euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
It was Arthur James Balfour, the foreign minister in Britain’s wartime coalition government, and before that prime minister, who gave Zionism’s colonial enterprise a degree of spurious legitimacy. He did it in a note addressed to Baron Lionel Rothschild on 2 November 1917. The Balfour Declaration (as it became known) was in part a response to the personal pleading and lobbying of Dr. Chaim Weizmann,who had become the leader of the World Zionist Organisation after Herzl’s premature death. The document said:
“His Majesty’s Government views 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.” (Emphasis added).
Palestine at the time was controlled by Turkey, and Britain hadno right of any kind to give Palestine away, in whole or in part, to anybody. In 1957 an article in the American Bar Association Journalby Sol Linowitz (who was to become an adviser to, and negotiator for, President Carter) concluded that the Balfour Declaration was “legally impotent“.
The Balfour Declaration concealed from public view a reality which, if it had been acknowledged, would have invited the conclusion that catastrophe was bound to be the outcome if Zionism was allowed to have its way. The concealed reality was the make-up of the population of Palestine.At the moment the Balfour Declaration was issued, the Arabs numbered about 670,000and constituted 93 percentof the population. Jews then in Palestine numbered about 60,000and constituted seven percentof the population. The term “Arab” or “Arabs” did not appear in the Balfour Declaration. As we have seen, it reduced the 93 percent Arab majority to “existing non-Jewish communities.”
In the House of Commons in July 1937, Winston Churchill, (then excluded from office and campaigning for the Hitler threat to be taken seriously), gave an explanation of whythe Balfour Declaration was issued. He said:
“It is a delusion to suppose this was a mere act of crusading enthusiasm or quixotic philanthropy. On the contrary, it was a measure taken… in due need of the warwith the object of promoting the general victory of the Allies, for which weexpected andreceived valued and importantassistance.” (Emphasis added).
The clear implication of those words is that in November 1917Britain had needed the Zionists and their influence and had been prepared to pay the price they asked for it.
There is not space in this shortish article to go into the documented detail of whatassistance Britain needed from Zionism and whereit was needed. But the following can be said in summary.
In November 1917, Britain was facing the prospect ofdefeat in World War I.The Admiralty had warned that Britain might have to surrender. To stave off any prospect of defeat, Britain needed Zionism’s influence in revolutionary Russiaand America. The Zionists were expected to use their influence to keep Russia(Britain’s ally) in the war and, also, to prevent a complete communist takeover (of Russia); and the Zionists were expected to use their influence to bring America into the war,and to see that, against the clock, the money was available to fund the upgrading and expansion of America’s war machine.
And there were two other factors at work.
British policy makers believed that the establishment of a Zionist state in the Arab heartland would assist Britain’s control of the region by, among other things, keeping the Arabs dividedabout how to deal with it.
It was also the case that Britain’s leaders, the anti-Semitic Balfour in particular, did not want any more Jews in Britain. From 1881, because of poverty and persecution including pogroms, Jews had been streaming out of their Tsarist Russian homeland in search of a better life in America and Western Europe. Senior figures in Britain’s Conservative establishment feared, as did Britain’s long settled Jews, that an influx of more Jews might provoke anti-Semitism.
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