"Can a state established by deceit and forcible ouster of the people of the
land expect them to accept its legitimacy by mere efflux of time? What are 60
years to an ancient people, the Arabs? International recognition of Israel as a
state cannot wipe out the facts of history or erase from the memories of the
people it has wronged the brutalities it has perpetrated. International law is
based on the states quo. For long it legitimised colonial rule. In law the
colony was part of the territory of its overlord. It has nothing to do with
morality. Israel simply lacks moral legitimacy. Itself a product of terror, it
cannot complain if the people under occupation take to arms."
It may be your interest to be our masters, but how can it be ours to be your
slaves?
Vol:25 Iss:04 URL:
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2504/stories/20080229504908000.htm
---------------------------------
BOOKS
Balfours deceit
A.G. NOORANI
International recognition of Israel as a state cannot wipe out the
facts of history.
Michael Makovskys study of Churchills views on Palestine is a work of
immense labour. Its documentation reveals a lot. Consistency was not
Churchills strong point. He advocated a Jewish homeland as far back as in
1906. If in 1915 Lloyd George advocated grabbing Palestine owing to the
prestige it would give us, Churchill scribbled to Foreign Secretary Edward
Grey Palestine must be given to Christian, liberal and now noble Belgium.
Makovskys researches fully establish Balfours deceit: The definition of
national home was left intentionally ambiguous. The Zionists purposely used
the term home in Basle in 1897, so as not to provoke the Gentiles, but had
made conflicting statements since then about whether they intended a state or
not. Weizmann considered development of a state a slow process, which certainly
would have been necessary for the Jews to become a majority in Palestine. (At
the time of the Declaration, there were estimated to be 50,000-65,000 Jews out
of a total population of 700,000). Balfour told the War Cabinet on October 31,
1917, that national home meant an entity under British or American
protectorate which permitted the Jews to build up
a real centre of national
culture and focus of national life. It did not necessarily involve the early
establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter of gradual
development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political
evolution. With centre, he borrowed the vague term which Herbert Samuel
employed in 1915. Balfour did not commit to a definition in public, but
privately confided in 1918. My personal hope is that the Jews will make good
in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish state. The British press mostly
understood the Declaration as promising a Jewish state. Curzon was right after
all. But, as Balfour minuted on August 6, 1919, I am an ardent Zionist.
(Documents, page 330).
The Documents confirm the evidence of deceit. Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, a
pro-Zionist political officer in the British military administration in
Palestine, warned Curzon on September 26, 1919: The people of Palestine are
not at present in a fit state to be told openly that the establishment of
Zionism in Palestine is the policy to which H.M.G., America and France are
committed. They certainly do not realise this fact. (Documents, page 472).
Balfour himself was more candid in a talk with Justice Brandeis of the U.S.
Supreme Court, and Felix Frankfurter, who became a judge in the court later.
Both were Zionist activists. They met in Paris on June 24, 1919, when Balfour
referred to the King-Crane Commission of Inquiry set up by President Woodrow
Wilson in order to ascertain what the people [of the region] really wanted.
Frankfurter pressed the view that Palestine should be the Jewish homeland and
not merely that there be a Jewish homeland there. Balfour replied that he had
tried unsuccessfully to exclude Palestine from the Commissions remit, because
the powers had committed themselves to the Zionist programme, which inevitably
excluded numerical self-determination. Palestine presented a unique situation.
We are dealing not with the wishes of an existing community but are consciously
seeking to re-constitute a new community and definitely building for a
numerical majority in the future. (Emphasis added,
throughout.) That was not what he said in public.
Frankfurter remarked: No statesman could have been more sympathetic than Mr.
Balfour was with the underlying philosophy and aims of Zionism
nor more eager
that they should be realised. (Documents, pages 1277-1278).
Short shrift to Zionists
The King-Crane Commissions Report gave short shrift to Zionist aims after a
thorough probe into the peoples view: We recommend, in the fifth place,
serious modification of the extreme Zionist programme for Palestine of
unlimited immigration of Jews, looking finally to making Palestine distinctly a
Jewish state.
The Commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its
favour, but the actual facts in Palestine, coupled with the force of the
general principles proclaimed by the Allies and accepted by the Syrians have
driven them to the recommendation here made.
The fact came out repeatedly in
the Commissions conferences with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists
looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present
non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase [of land].
It cited Wilsons emphasis on the democratic principle and said: If that
principle is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestines population are to be
decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered
that the non-Jewish population of Palestine nearly nine-tenths of the whole
are emphatically against the entire Zionist programme
there was no one thing
upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed than upon this. To
subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady
financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation
of the principle just quoted, and of the peoples rights, though it kept within
the forms of law
the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist
representatives, that they have a right to Palestine, based on an occupation
of 2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.
But Henry King, President of the Oberlin College, and Charles Crane, an
industrialist from Chicago, could not weaken the British Cabinets resolve
despite the fact that they were appointed on the Commission by President
Wilson. President Wilsons fortunes were already in decline. Significantly, an
ardent Zionist, Herbert Samuel, was appointed as the first British High
Commissioner for Palestine. When they fell out later, Lloyd George taunted him:
I made him the first Procurator of Judea since Pontius Pilate.
Tom Segev rightly holds that there is no basis for the frequent assertion
that the State [of Israel] was established as a result of the Holocaust
That
sympathy helped the Zionists advance their diplomatic campaign and their
propaganda. Prof. Peter Clarke agrees. The escalating crisis for European
Jewry under the Nazis had not created the case for Zionist immigration. It
simply reinforced it. (The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, page 86).
He recalls Churchills evidence to the Peel Commission in 1937 the British
government had all along envisaged a great Jewish state there, numbered by
millions, far exceeding the present inhabitants of the country. Labour was as
pro-Zionist. Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews come in,
Hugh Dalton wrote.
Imperial concerns were not absent. The Jewish state, alien to its
environment, would be the Wests outpost in West Asia. A reader of the
Documents on British Policy is struck by the Arabs ardour for unity. The
barter of Palestine was of a piece with the disruption of Arab unity. The
General Syrian Congress declared on July 2, 1919: We reject the claims of the
Zionists for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in that part of
Southern Syria which is known as Palestine, and we are opposed to Jewish
immigration into any part of the country
We desire that there should be no
dismemberment of Syria, and no separation of Palestine or the coastal regions
in the West or the Lebanon from the mother country; and we ask that the unity
of the country be maintained under any circumstances. If Nasser moved the
Arab street, it was because he spoke as an Arab, rather than an Egyptian,
nationalist. Dismemberment created separate and vested interests.
The sell-out MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP
The separation wall in Abu Dis, Jerusalem. The ideology that enabled the
depopulation of half of Palestines native people in 1948 is still alive, and
continues to drive the inexorable, sometimes discernable, cleansing of those
Palestinians who live there today.
However, the tragic truth is that not only were Arab leaders of the times
inept, but they were also corrupt. Sherif Husseins sons, Abdullah and Feisal,
were foremost among them. Abdullah took £5,000 to accept the deal by which he
was given Transjordan. Among those who sold lands to the Jews were leaders of
the Arab national movement patriots on the outside, traitors on the inside,
Tom Segev records. Zionist officials prepared a list of their names. Musa Kazim
al-Husseini, former mayor of Jerusalem and a recognised leader of the movement,
was on the list as were eight other Arab mayors.
The Arab leaders willingness to sell land to the Jews heightened the
contempt Zionist figures felt for the Arab national movement. After a meeting
with Arab dignitaries, Chaim Weizmann concluded, They are ready to sell their
souls to the highest bidder. The compact Weizmann reached with Prince Faisal
in 1918 had also been based on the assumption that the prince would make money
off his peace with the Zionists. One of Faisals aides had received a down
payment of £1,000 and then demanded more. This experience contributed to the
Jews conclusion that the national consciousness of the Palestinian Arabs could
be bought. Indeed, politicians and petty thieves, dignitaries as well as
hoodlums all offered the Zionists their services in espionage and sabotage,
in rumour-mongering, defamation, extortion, and all kinds of intimidation; the
supply often outstripped the demand. The British kept company with the Jewish
agency in paying bribes. President Roosevelt told Chaim
Weizmann that, in his opinion, the Arabs could be bought. The word baksheesh
(tip) appears in the minutes of their talks.
Land transfers alone could not have achieved Jewish aims. Recourse to terror
was inescapable to drive out the Arabs from their homes. This should not have
caused any surprise. The Central Intelligence Agency prepared a paper, The
consequences of the Partition of Palestine, dated November 28, 1947 (The View
from 1947 by Thomas W. Lippman; Middle East Journal; Vol. 61, No. 1; Winter
2007). It predicted the outbreak of war if a Jewish state was created. In 1943,
Roosevelts special envoy Col. Harold Hoskins reported that only by military
force can a Zionist State be imposed upon the Arabs. The CIAs paper noted the
Zionists capacity as well as their ambitions. Their fighting forces would
consist of 70,000 to 90,000 members of Hagana, the Zionist army; the 6,000 to
8,000 members of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, an underground organisation that
employs sabotage and terrorism as its preferred tactics in its campaign for
independence; and the extreme fanatics known as the
Stern Gang or Lehi, about 500 men who, the CIA said, do not hesitate to
assassinate government officials and police officers or to obtain funds by acts
of violence against Jews as well as others.
Its prediction of the Arabs victory was proved wrong. The only army worth
the name was the Arab Legion of Transjordan led by Sir John Glubb. But King
Abdullah, true to form, had secretly agreed with the Jews that he would not go
beyond capturing the West Bank. According to the CIA, Arab fears of Jewish
expansionism was justified: In the long run no Zionists in Palestine will be
satisfied with the territorial arrangements of the partition settlement,
though it allocated about 50% of Palestine to the Jews and called for Jerusalem
to be a neutral, international city.
Prof. Ilan Pappe has rendered high service by documenting the Jews ethnic
cleansing of Palestine. Israel was established on May 14, 1948. Plan Dalet was
formulated by the Consultancy on March 10, 1948. That same evening military
orders were dispatched to the units on the ground to prepare for the systematic
expulsion of the Palestinians from vast areas of the country. The orders came
with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the
people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and
population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion;
demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the
expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued with its own list of
villages and neighbourhoods as the targets of this master plan. Codenamed Plan
D [Dalet in Hebrew], this was the fourth and final version of less substantial
plans that outlined the fate the Zionists
had in store for Palestine and consequently for its native population. The
previous three schemes had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist
leadership contemplated dealing with the presence of so many Palestinians
living in the land the Jewish national movement coveted as its own. This fourth
and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians
had to go. He bases his summary on the records of the caucus meetings. Moshe
Dayan and Yigal Allon were its members.
Ethnic cleansing is recognised in international law as a crime against
humanity. The International Criminal Court has been created to punish its
perpetrators, not to forget the special ICCs for the former Yugoslavia and
Rwanda.
Plan D of 1948 was a revised version of previous ones, Plan A, B and C. A was
drafted in 1937; B in 1946.
They were meshed into C in 1948 which spelt out the actions to be taken.
Killing the Palestinian political leadership. Killing Palestinian inciters and
their financial supporters. Killing Palestinians who acted against Jews.
Killing senior Palestinian officers and officials (in the Mandatory system).
Damaging Palestinian transportation. Damaging the sources of Palestinian
livelihoods; water wells, mills, etc. Attacking nearby Palestinian villages
likely to assist in future attacks. Attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses,
meeting places, etc. Plan C added that all data required for the performance of
these actions could be found in the village files; lists of leaders, activists,
potential human targets, the precise layout of villages, and so on.
A passage from Plan D read: These operations can be carried out in the
following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by
blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those
population centres which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting
combing and control operations according to the following guidelines:
encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of
resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled
outside the borders of the state.
Pappe notes that the ideology that enabled the depopulation of half of
Palestines native people in 1948 is still alive, and continues to drive the
inexorable, sometimes discernable, cleansing of those Palestinians who live
there today.
ATEF SAFADI/AFP
A Palestinian family passing through a gap in a concrete "security" wall that
divides the East Jerusalem Palestinian neighbourhood of Abu Dis into two parts.
A January 2003 picture. It is to this Israel that, on January 11, 2008,
President George W. Bush asked the Arab States to reach out. He has done
nothing to prevent Israel from building new settlements or from violating basic
human rights. Israels policies are inspired by the ideology that led to its
creation. Neither Palestinians nor Jews will be saved, from one another or
from themselves, if the ideology that still drives the Israeli policy towards
the Palestinians is not correctly identified. The problem with Israel was never
its Jewishness Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis
for peace and cohabitation; it is the ethnic Zionist character. Zionism does
not have the same margins of pluralism that Judaism offers, especially not for
the Palestinians. They can never be part of the
Zionist state and space, and will continue to fight and hopefully their
struggle will be peaceful and successful. If not, it will be desperate and
vengeful and, like a whirlwind, will suck all up in a huge perpetual sandstorm
that will rage not only through the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also within
Britain and the United States, the powers which, each in their turn, feed the
tempest that threatens to ruin us all.
Can a state established by deceit and forcible ouster of the people of the
land expect them to accept its legitimacy by mere efflux of time? What are 60
years to an ancient people, the Arabs? International recognition of Israel as a
state cannot wipe out the facts of history or erase from the memories of the
people it has wronged the brutalities it has perpetrated. International law is
based on the states quo. For long it legitimised colonial rule. In law the
colony was part of the territory of its overlord. It has nothing to do with
morality. Israel simply lacks moral legitimacy. Itself a product of terror, it
cannot complain if the people under occupation take to arms.
But will that be of any avail to them? Human blood, whether Jewish or Arab,
is priceless. Violence has not accomplished and will not accomplish anything.
Fortunately, there is growing acceptance within and outside Israel of the facts
of history. The Arabs in Palestine can stir the Israelis and the worlds
conscience by recourse to a non-violent campaign of revolt till justice is done
to them in the light of the realities of today, however painful they are.
More cannot be demanded of the Palestinians. As Thycidides said, It may be
your interest to be our masters, but how can it be ours to be your slaves?
---------------------------------
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With Regards
Abi
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