Balfour Declaration: Britain’s Fatal Mistake in Palestine

On the occasion of the 104th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration on November 2, the Arab League on Tuesday called on Britain to apologize for the partition of Palestine.

The Arab League said in a statement, “On this anniversary, the General Secretariat of the Arab League states once again calls on the UK to right this historic wrong, accepting its historical, legal and moral responsibility.” Apologize to the Palestinian people for the pain and suffering they have endured for over a century.’

The Arab League has also demanded that Britain recognize a Palestinian state on the lines of July 4, 1957, with East Jerusalem as its head.

On this occasion, dozens of Palestinians demonstrated in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza, in which the protesters demanded Britain to apologize for its mistake with the help of banners and placards.

The Balfour Declaration was a public pledge by Great Britain on 2 November 1917 to support the establishment of a ‘national state’ for the Jews within the Palestinian Territory.

This declaration was issued by then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in a letter to the leader of the Jewish community in Britain, Lionel Walter Rothschild, and it later became the basis for the establishment of Israel in the Palestinian territories.

For what this declaration was, and what was its background, we present an article by Eugene Rogan, which is being published with thanks to ‘The Muslim Times’.

Balfour Declaration: Britain’s Fatal Mistake in Palestine

Eugene Rogen

In the hostile and unfavorable atmosphere of nationalism, Britain had no choice but to withdraw from the territory it hoped would become a permanent part of its empire.

A century has passed since Lord Balfour’s declaration, but the Foreign Secretary of former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George or successive governments have yet to agree on what they wanted to do with Palestine.

It shouldn’t have been such a mystery. The fact is that Britain wanted to make Palestine a part of its empire due to geo-strategic reasons arising after the First World War. To achieve this goal, the British government tried to use the Zionist movement to its advantage, not to establish a separate Zionist state, but to face the expected resistance of the Palestinian Arabs who settled in Palestine. Partnership should be made with the Zionist settlers.

This situation can be compared to France’s invasion of Lebanon. The Zionists in British Palestine were doing the same thing as the Maronites in Lebanon. Like the Maronites, the Zionists of Palestine were an organized minority community that openly advocated British rule over the Palestinian territories at the Paris Peace Conference and joined hands with the British in governing the territory.

This desire to incorporate Palestine into the British Empire was quite new in 1917. There is no evidence of Britain’s declared interest in the Palestinian territories administered by the Ottoman Empire before the First World War. This attitude of disinterest continued till the beginning of the war.

In April and May of 1915, the De Bunsen Committee, set up on the issue of the British Empire’s interest in the Ottoman Empire’s territories in Asia, found practically no such Each claim was rejected.

In its review, the D. Benson Committee concluded that ‘Palestine should be recognized as a country whose future decision is the subject of special negotiations, in which both neutral and belligerent factions have an equal interest.’

Distribution strategy

These recommendations paved the way for the British Partition Strategy, which was followed by an agreement between Sir Mark Sykes and Charles François-Georges Picot in April and October 1916. Palestine was declared a joint international territory under French, Russian and British administration, with the Mediterranean port of Haifa handed over to Britain.

Between October 1916 and November 1917, Britain’s position changed dramatically from disinterest to a determination to annex Palestine under its imperial rule. An important role in this change was the war in the Sinai Valley.

In the early years of the war, Britain defended the Suez Canal from its west bank. Since there were no wells or water supply in the Sinai Peninsula, troops could not be stationed there. This allowed the Ottomans to make an open advance in the Sinai and launched two offensives in the Suez Canal Zone in February 1915 and August 1916. Modern artillery could attack ships in the canal from a distance of five or more miles. In southern Palestine, where water from wells was always available, the enemy could at any time attack the line of ships in the Suez Canal with his army.

The British continued a slow-moving campaign for the rest of 1916 and the early months of 1917 to drive the Ottomans out of the Sinai Peninsula, with railway lines to supply supplies and pipes to ensure water for the troops and their animals. Lay the line. They faced strong resistance from the Ottoman forces in Gaza, who strongly defended their territory against heavy British attacks in March and April 1917.

The first and second battles of Gaza ended in defeat for Britain, which further fueled Britain’s fear that the enemy could launch a dangerous attack from Palestine at any time. It was the experience of the war that replaced Britain’s disinterest in Palestine with a determination to dominate it.

Finally, in the Battle of Beersheba on October 31, 1917, the British forces broke through the Ottoman defenses in southern Palestine and advanced rapidly towards Jerusalem. In December, Jerusalem surrendered itself to Britain in December. Three days after the victory in Beersheba, the Balfour Declaration was issued, in which the British government promised to establish a homeland for the Jews in Palestine.

Backing Zionist ambitions

It is clear that the experience during the war led to British interest in making Palestine a part of their empire. We can easily trace this renewed interest between the Sykes-Picot Treaty of October 1916 and the Battle of Beersheba in October 1917. However, this rapid change in imperialist strategy included another factor that needs to be explained: the decision to support Zionist ambitions in Palestine.

Before World War I, Britain had little interest in Zionism. In 1913, the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, Sir Arthur Nicholson, refused to meet Nahum Sokolow, a member of the Executive Board of the World Zionist Organization. He sent his secretary to meet with Sokolow, and when the secretary told Nicholson about the meeting, his reply was ‘It is better for us not to support the Zionist movement anyway. The resettlement of Jews is an internal administrative matter on which there is great disagreement in Turkey.

In July 1914, Sokolow again tried to get an appointment, but even then the British authorities showed no interest in Zionism. According to Foreign Office records, the reply was that ‘There is no need to waste anyone’s time in this way.’ In this way, the efforts of the second meeting also went in vain.

There is nothing surprising in this. In 1914, Zionism was considered an ideological movement with a very limited following. The Jewish community of three hundred thousand in Britain had no more than 8,000 members, so a fringe movement that attracted a small circle of Jews living in a dream world was a ‘waste of time’. ‘ didn’t really make any sense.

Secondly, compared to today, British society was very hostile to Jews at that time. No one could have imagined that the British authorities would advocate Jewish movements.

By 1917, Britain recognized the strategic importance of Zionism and its attitude towards the movement began to change. The Russian Revolution in 1917 raised doubts about whether Russia would keep its wartime promises.

Many in Britain believed that if Jews felt that the Allied victory was paving the way for Zionist goals in Palestine, Jews in Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government might encourage the Russian army to advance further.

Others were of the opinion that Jews in America would force President Woodrow Wilson to join the war and throw his weight in favor of the Allies. The United States entered the war very slowly and its people were not enthusiastic about the war situation.

That is why America declared war against Germany in 1917. A favorable strategy in favor of Zionism may have prompted the White House to step up its efforts to enter the war through influential Jews. As historian Tom Segue notes, it was Zionist efforts to change global anti-Semitism that benefited global politics and finance.

Lloyd George and his government were ready for any alliance that could help end the endless series of World War I with an Allied victory, so they resorted to the Zionist movement.

Dramatic twist

There was another reason for Britain’s partnership with Zionism in 1917. Just a year earlier, Sykes had agreed with Pico on the partition of Ottoman Arab territory. After France and Russia agreed to hand over Palestine to international authority and made their interests clear, it was almost impossible for Russia to adopt a sympathetic attitude to Britain’s new claims.

Britain needed a third party to blame for such a dramatic change in partition strategy. By supporting the Zionist movement, Britain could claim that it was helping Europe’s ‘Jewish demand’ to return to its biblical homeland, not for its own selfish imperial interests, but for a historical social justice. .

It was in this spirit that Lord Balfour, in his most important letter to Lord Rothschild, assured of Britain’s best efforts. It seemed that Britain was talking about handing over Palestine to the Zionists, but actually Lloyd George’s government was using the Zionist movement to secure Palestine for itself.

Thus, Balfour made a significant announcement of the British government’s commitment that it would use its ‘best endeavours’ to ‘facilitate the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine’. Note: A ‘national home’ not a ‘state’ and ‘Jews’ not Zionists.

Although many critics have focused on the fact that the Balfour Declaration addresses the Palestinians as ‘the non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ instead of naming them, I believe that the declaration of the national identity of Jews and Arabs. Identity is left equally indeterminate. The declaration was about ‘civil and religious rights’ rather than national rights.

In other words, the Balfour Declaration is not a promise to establish a Jewish state. I see this as the creation of a rich minority community designed to facilitate Britain’s acquisition of new colonial territories. In the face of expected opposition from the Palestinian Arab majority population, the Zionists were seen as a completely reliable partner for Britain to maintain its authority because it was dependent on Britain for its status in Palestine.

Palestinian opposition

Britain had no doubt that the Palestinians would oppose its plans. After General Edmund Allen B’s capture of Jerusalem in December 1917, many of his operatives were there to obtain reliable secret reports on the political views of the local population.

If Britain had bothered to read the reports of the American King Crane Commission during the summer of 1919, they would have had all the facts to conclude that the Balfour Declaration was not going to succeed. .

The King Crane report stated that ‘the non-Jewish population of Palestine, which is ten percent of the total population, is strongly opposed to the entire Zionist project. Various statistics make it clear that there is nothing the Palestinian population agrees on more than this.’

The report also mentioned that ‘every British officer the Commission asked was of the same opinion that the Zionist plan could not be carried out without arms.’ Britain was aware of how strongly the Palestinians would oppose their plans.

Ironically, in the face of such opposition at the local level, Britain felt that it could reap better benefits by establishing a loyal ally through the Zionist settler community. The Jewish settlers were European and culturally closer to the British than to the Palestinian Arabs (although British authorities continued to ‘Orientalise’ the Jews and considered them eligible under (misinterpreted) Darwinian social evolution. seen at a lower level than in the UK).

A highly organized Jewish minority, viewed with hostility by the majority population, would depend entirely on eligible Britain to protect its status. Due to his compulsion, he was also reliable. Because Britain was protecting the Zionist settlers from local enemies, it could count on them for cooperation.

Heavy stone of empire

The ‘necessary and reliable’ were heavy stones for the British Empire. The French took their work from the minority community more boldly than the British. The Maronites in Mount Lebanon were one such minority community that paved the way for French rule. France made a similar partnership with Syria’s Alawite and Druze communities, offering them independent small states in Syria under the French Empire.

Britain, for its part, approached the sons of Sharif Makkah Hussain under a strategy known as the Sharifian Solution, which would have placed the Hashemite Sharifs on the thrones of Jordan and Iraq.

The British were confident that aliens in their own countries and lacking popular support or financial stability, Emir Abdullah in Jordan and King Faisal in Iraq would be completely dependent on them and therefore could be trusted to run these states. Britain had no Sharifian solution for Palestine. Instead, the Zionist settler community fulfilled this role.

But the Zionists will only be dependable and reliable so long as they are in the minority. If they become the majority in Palestine, they will start the struggle for freedom. Britain had absolutely no doubt that Zionism was a nationalist movement.

In 1922, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s White Paper was as much to cool the hostile feelings of the Palestinian Arabs as it was to remind the Jews who settled in Palestine of their limits. As is well known, Churchill rejected ‘Palestine belongs to the Jews as England belongs to the British’. He completely rejected ‘the subjugation or subjugation of the Arab population, language or culture in Palestine’. He asserted that the “provisions of the Balfour Declaration do not say that the whole of Palestine should be turned into a national home for the Jews, but that such a home should be established within Palestine.”

Churchill was saying that the Jewish community in Palestine should remain as an organized minority and that within these limits they could look to Britain for a project for a Jewish national home.’

‘Conflict getting out of hand’

Of course, Britain was never able to create a balance between advancing the Jewish National Home project and establishing peace in Palestine. Against the backdrop of the wave of riots in 1929, the Nazi seizure of power in 1931 and 1933, and the mass exodus of Jews after the anti-Semitic Nuremberg in 1935, the British launched a systematic series of inquiries and white papers.

Between 1930 and 1931, an average of 5,000 refugees per year increased to 9,500 in 1932, 30,000 in 1933, 42,000 in 1934, and 62,000 in 1935. In 1936, the number of Jewish settlers increased from 10% of the total population of Palestine to 30%, and this trend continues to this day.

The settlement and purchase of land by the Jews led to economic depression, which in turn led to increased anxiety and restlessness among the Palestinian population. In 1936, the Palestinians raised a full-fledged revolt against British rule and the Jews settled by that rule.

In the first phase of the Arab Revolt, Britain was able to stop it through a Commission of Inquiry. But the Peel Commission Report in 1937 attributed the failure to British rule: ‘In a small country an intractable conflict has begun between two national communities. About one million Arabs are openly or internally at war with four hundred thousand Jews. There is nothing common between them, their cultural and social life and their way of thinking and behavior are also separate from each other like their national aspirations. These are the biggest obstacles in the way of peace.’

In other words, for the first time in twenty years after the Balfour Declaration, Britain recognized that its desire for power had created a conflict between rival and incompatible Palestinian Arabs and Zionists. According to the Peel Commission, this situation could only be resolved by ending the British Mandate and partitioning the land of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, which Britain would administer by treaty ‘according to the example established in Iraq’.

For the first time you have raised eyebrows questioning how Britain wanted to make the Jewish and Arab states ‘independent’. In the Anglo-Iraq Treaty of 1930, foreign and military affairs were handed over to Britain, which was a form of colonial reconstruction.

Reconstruction of Colonial Relations

I will argue that the recommendations of the Peel Commission were reshaping, not ending, colonial relations in Palestine. Starting with the partition map of 1937, the Peel Commission drew a line from Galilee to White, including Tiberias and Nazareth, with a border turning westward at Besan through Acre and Haifa through Tel Aviv and Jaffa. He gave about one-third of Palestine to the Jewish state, creating the El of Lands.

When you look at the map, two things are immediately clear, the first is that the British concentrated the main ports and economic centers of Palestine into the hands of their Zionist partners. Second, more important, such a small state would be surrounded by Arab neighbors Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories, whose hostility to the Zionists is not hidden, so the Jewish state would always depend on Britain for its protection.

So instead of granting statehood to the Zionist movement, the British were strengthening themselves by reorganizing their economic center in Palestine and handing over the territory to their needy and reliable Zionist partners. The remaining two-thirds of Palestine was to be included in the Transjordan region under Abdullah’s rule, and the Transjordan mandate was to be replaced by an ‘independence’ agreement.

In other words, the British were finally applying the Sharifian solution to Palestine and were handing over the suffering land to their needy and trusted ruler, Abdullah. The Peel Commission plan of 1937 was not a declaration of freedom for Jews or Arabs. Rather, it was an attempt to reconstruct colonial relations in Palestine along the lines of those tried in Iraq, providing for the reestablishment of imperial relations through a treaty.

partial freedom

Needless to say, the recommendations of the Peel Commission were rejected by the Palestinians, resulting in another two years of intense aggression and the deployment of 25,000 soldiers and police by Britain to quell the Arab revolt.

To restore peace, the British issued a final White Paper in 1939 that proposed new terms for partition. According to which, for the next five years, the number of Jews who will come and settle in Palestine will not exceed 15,000 per year, or their total number will not exceed 75,000. This would increase the Jewish population of Palestine to 35%. After five years, no more settlers would enter Palestine without the consent of the majority population, and the opinion of the majority population on this matter was as clear as day.

In 1949 Palestine would become independent with majority rule (again probably a partial independence of the sort the British had already given to Iraq and now to Egypt in 1939). Notable among the components of the 1939 White Paper was the limitation of the number of Jewish settlers in Britain to 15,000 per year for the next five years, bringing them to 35% of the total population. Just full stop here. Under this plan, the new Jewish settlers would always be in the minority and depend entirely on Britain for their protection in a hostile environment.

If Britain had allowed the Jewish community to make up fifty percent of the population, it would have faced the same demands from the Jews to leave Palestine as the Arab population of Palestine.

The Jews led by David Ben-Gurion, the head of Zionism in Palestine, rejected the White Paper, but in view of the possible fear of war with the German Nazis, they famously said that they would fight the Nazis as if there was no White Paper. They will fight against the white paper as if it was a war stage.

Some other more radical Zionists openly declared war on Britain, hinting at a Jewish revolt that would prove fatal to Britain’s position in Palestine. As Argonne declared in January 1944 when he declared war, ‘there is no longer a truce between the Jews and the British administration in Israel. Our people are on the battlefield against this government, a war till the end.’

The final condemnation

The Jewish uprising of 1944-47 proved fatal to the British Mandate, with targeted assassinations of officials, attacks on infrastructure, bombings of police stations and the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946. Large numbers of refugees, mostly Holocaust survivors, began arriving by ship to the shores of Palestine and a Jewish population fueled by nationalistic sentiments grew, limiting British Jewish settlers. The strategy failed.

But I think the final nail in the coffin of British rule proved to be the loss of Jewish support. Despite opposition from an Arab majority with an organized Jewish minority, Britain could hope to maintain a firm grip on Palestine. In the competitive and hostile atmosphere of nationalism, Britain had no choice but to withdraw the territory and hand it over to the United Nations.

In conclusion I would say that Britain’s aim in Palestine was always to retain the region as part of her empire, an empire which she believed would last for many generations. The Jewish community in Palestine was an essential contributor to the preservation of British rule, but only as an organized minority community. Britain never wanted to cede Palestine to the Jews, and Jewish support in imperial projects was limited to mere partnership.

The fatal mistake of the British was the assumption that they would control the opposing nationalisms in Palestine. But as soon as the Jewish population rose above a certain threshold, Britain became irrelevant in Palestine.