Britain’s Zionists Prepare the Ground:
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) British Prime Minister from 1874-1880 once said: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews”.
Between October 1917 and September 1918, the whole of Palestine was occupied by the Allied Forces under General Allenby and placed under a temporary British military administration. Before the dust had settled on Allenby’s advances into Palestine, and on the 2nd of November 1917, the British Government published what has been notoriously known ever since as the ‘Balfour Declaration’ which took the form of a letter from Arthur J Balfour (1848-1930), a Conservative politician and British Prime Minister from 1902-1905, and, at the time of the Declaration, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, addressed to Lord L Walter Rothschild (1868-1937) a British banker and member of the wealthy Rothschild financial dynasty. This Declaration came about after extensive lobbying from the Zionist leadership whose spokesman and tireless lobbyist Chaim Weizmann never missed an opportunity to prepare the grounds to secure this Declaration. In one letter which he wrote to a friend in December 1914, he said:
“I saw Balfour on Saturday [mid December 1914] and the interview lasted one and a half hours. Balfour remembered everything we discussed 8 years ago [1906] and I gave him a brief summary of what has happened over these years…He listened for a long time and was very moved - I assure you, to tears - and he took me by the hand and said that I had illuminated for him the road followed by a great suffering nation [the Jewish nation], and expressed his opinion that the question of Palestine would remain insoluble…until there was a normal Jewish community in Palestine. He asked me whether I wanted anything practical at present. I said no, [but that] I would like to call on him again…when the roar of the guns had stopped [meaning, WW1]. He saw me out into the street, holding my hand in silence, and bidding me farewell said warmly: ‘Mind you come again to see me, I am deeply moved and interested, it is not a dream, it is a great cause and I understand it’ “.
The Declaration then followed 3 years later and stated that:
“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”.
And all these promises already before even Allenby completed his advances into Palestine. At that time, there were 568,000 Palestinians living in Palestine together with 58,000 Jews owning 10% of the land.
To give it an international seal of legitimacy, the Balfour Declaration draft text was submitted to President Woodrow Wilson of the United States who approved it prior to publication. On the 14th February and 9th May 1918 respectively, France and Italy followed suite and publicly endorsed it.
Fighting with the Turks ended in victory for the Allies on the 28th June, 1919. The League of Nations Covenant was also signed at this time. Article 22 of the Covenant prescribed that the wishes of the people formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory. According to the surveys conducted at the time, it was privately reported that the Arabs had opted for the United States to be their supervisory body. The Zionist leadership opted for the trusteeship of Great Britain over Palestine and when Turkish rule formally ended under the Treaty of Sevres on 10 August 1920, the Zionists ensured that the famous Balfour Declaration was embodied in it under Article 22.
The embodiment of this Zionist dream within the League’s Covenant sealed the fate of Palestine at this early stage of the Mandate. If there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about this linkage, it was dispelled by Article 4 of the Mandate which stated:
“An appropriate Jewish Agency shall be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and cooperating with the Administration of Palestine…as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine…The Zionist Organization shall be recognized as such agency…and shall take steps in consultation with His Britannic Majesty’s Government to…assist in the establishment of the Jewish national home in Palestine”.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965) twice British Prime Minister between 1940-45 and 1951-55, endorsed it officially in a letter he wrote in 1920 which said that “it has fallen to the British Government, as a result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and a centre of national life. The fiery energies of Dr Weizmann leader of the Zionist project, supported by the full authority of Lord Allenby, are all directed to achieving the success of this inspiring movement. Of course Palestine is far too small to accommodate more than a fraction of the Jewish race, but if there should be created in our lifetime by the Banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise 3 or 4 million Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire”.
In this atmosphere of promises and deceptions, the Mandate for Palestine was formally allotted to Great Britain at the Peace Conference of San Remo on 25 April 1920.
The borders of Mandate Palestine were drawn up in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement in San Remo. This agreement was seen by many as a turning point in Western-Arab relations, as it negated promises made earlier to the Arabs for a national homeland in exchange for their help in defeating the Ottoman Empire.
Sir Mark Sykes (1879-1919)
The British, as the Mandatory power in Palestine, therefore, were confronting the contradiction of two irreconcilable aims: assisting Palestine to advance towards and to achieve independence under the Mandate Charter, and the commitment, under the Balfour Declaration, to a future Jewish Home in Palestine.
Article 22 of The League of Nations Covenant stated that the right of “those colonies and territories which, as a consequence of the late war, have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves…there should be applied the principle that the well being and development of such people form a sacred trust of civilisation and that the securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant”.
Continued illegal Jewish immigration and the purchase of Palestinian land by the Jewish National Fund reached record levels in the 1930’s with Hitler in Germany, and Mussolini in Italy, advocating the expulsion of Jews from Europe. By the mid 1930’s the Jews in Palestine formed one third of the total population enjoying the blessing of the Balfour Declaration.
Arab resistance escalated from delegations and emmisaries, petitions and declarations to demonstrations and strikes. This culminated in the first Palestine Riots in 1929 forcing the British Government to issue The Passfield White Paper in November 1930 calling for a limitation on Jewish immigration into Palestine. But with Zionist pressure mounting to allow more Jews into Palestine, the registered figures show that such immigration reached ‘invasion’ proportion in just 4 years: from 9,553 Jews in 1932 to 30,327 (1933) to 42,359 (1934) to 61,854 (1935) totalling 144,093. In the same period, the equivalent number of Jewish immigration to the USA was only 14,118. The Palestinian Arabs now braced themselves up for a national revolt.
The Palestinian Arab Rebellion of 1936 lasted for 3 years and forced Britain to send yet again one of its time-honoured commissions to Palestine. Led this time by Lord Peel, it concluded that the two objectives of Article 2 of the Mandate (eventual independence for the indigenous population and the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine) could not be reconciled, The Peel Commission recommended that Palestine be partitioned. The Palestinians, of course, were horrified at this conclusion which granted the Jews 40% of Palestine when Jewish land ownership at the time did not exceed 5.5%; the cruellest provision of all was that there should be, if necessary, a “forcible transfer of Arabs” out of lands allotted to the Jewish state (see later sections).
The Peel Commission (November 1937)
Arab revolt and resistance to this policy was more than equated by fierce British repression against the Palestinians. More than 5,000 were killed and over 15,000 wounded out of a population of 1 million (the equivalent at the time of 200,000 British and 1 million Americans killed and 600,000 British and 3 million Americans wounded). The number of detainees was over 5,600 in 1939 alone. All of this was accompanied by the terrorisation and murder of Arab villagers by special British-trained Jewish squads and underground terrorists.
The Zionist leadership in the persons of Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, were of course jubilant at the Peel recommendations, for this was the first time that the “Jewish National Home” was being officially and publicly equated with a “Jewish State”. It was also being pronounced by a great power, Britain, which was itself the Mandatory.
Ben-Gurion, although grateful for the Peel recommendations, stated soon afterwards that “The Jewish state now being proposed to us is not the Zionist aim. But this will be a decisive step in bringing about the great Zionist aim. In the shortest time possible, it will build the real Jewish strength that will carry us to our historic objectives”.
The Palestine Arab Revolt evoked the sympathy and support of Mahatma Gandhi who wrote in 1938: “Surely, it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their National Home”.
As the clouds of WWII were gathering and as the threat of international crisis was looming, the British Government called for a Round Table Conference attended by Arabs, Palestinians and Zionist representatives. Malcolm Macdonald, the new Colonial Secretary was the driving force behind it. The inconclusive conference issued its White Paper on May 17, 1939 which indicated a sudden change of heart from the British Government about the recommendations of the previous Peel Commission. This is perhaps it began to realise that Palestine could never become the solution for the Jewish problem and that the development of a National Home for the Jews in Palestine can be achieved only as a result of the wholesale eviction of the existing indigenous population. The White Paper of 1939 stated the following:
1. “The proposal of partition recommended by the Royal Commission, namely the establishment of self-supporting independent Arab and Jewish states within Palestine, has been found to be impracticable.
2. His Majesty’s Government now declares unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish state.
3. The object of His Majesty’s Government is the establishment within 10 years (i.e., by the end of its Mandate) of an independent Palestine State…in which Arabs and Jews share in government in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safeguarded”.