One hundred years ago, on November 9, 1917, the Times of London published a short letter from British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild and the Zionist Federation.
Known since then as the Balfour Declaration, it set out a proposal to establish a homeland in rural Palestine for the Jews, who formed around 3-5 percent of the population before 1914, when the territory was part of the Ottoman Empire.
The proposal was intentionally ambiguous, relating to a country that Britain did not yet control and whose people it had not consulted and omitting any reference to the term “state.”
The 67-word letter, written on November 2, stated:
“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.”
The Declaration is celebrated by the Zionists as laying the foundations for the state of Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu flew to London to mark the occasion at a dinner at Lancaster House with his counterpart, Theresa May.
While she said that Britain would mark its role in the founding of Israel “with pride,” official events have been low-key. Transport for London was moved to ban advertisements on the Underground and buses, highlighting objections to the Balfour Declaration by the Make It Right campaign. Commissioned by the Palestine Mission to the UK, the adverts featured pictures of Palestinian life before and after 1948, when the State of Israel was established, and 750,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes.
The Declaration was a sordid deal made over the heads of the inhabitants of Palestine, launching a nakedly colonial project that was to have a profound impact on the development of conflicts and divisions within the region. Britain’s role became one of the most controversial actions of its imperial history.
The Declaration paved the way for the establishment of the Jewish Legion to fight alongside British forces in Palestine, as well as the limited emigration of European Jews into post-World War I Palestine—which would be ruled by Britain under the victors’ carve-up of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East.
This began the now century-long conflict between the Arabs and Jews, both of who sought to establish nation states on the small Ottoman province largely governed from Damascus.
The Balfour Declaration was bound up first and foremost with the predatory aims of British imperialism in the Middle East region. The control of the newly discovered oil resources in Iraq and Iran, which powered the Royal Navy, was one of the issues that lay at the heart of the imperialist rivalries that erupted into World War I in 1914.
But the considerations involved were also determined by the February and later the October Revolutions in Russia in 1917, mass anti-war sentiment, and the US entry into the war to protect its own commercial interests against its enemies and allies alike, under the guise of making “the world safe for democracy” and a “war to end war.”
Just weeks after the Declaration was published, in January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson issued his famous “Fourteen Points” that included the removal of economic barriers between nations, the promise of self-determination for national minorities, and a world organization that would guarantee the “political independence and territorial integrity [of] great and small states alike”—a League of Nations.
Wilson’s professed support for self-determination was a weapon to be wielded on behalf of US imperialism against its rivals and their territorial preserves. Politically, it was a direct response to the Russian Revolution—particularly the Bolsheviks’ call for the negotiations with the German High Command at Brest-Litovsk to become the basis for a general peace agreement and their defence of the right to self-determination for oppressed minorities.
Many Jews had rejected nationalism as a solution to the pogroms and political reaction in Russia, which was home to five million Jews, the largest Jewish community in the world, at the end of the nineteenth century. Particularly after the failure of the 1905 revolution, many emigrated (very few of them to Palestine) or joined the socialist movement. Political Zionism was a small minority movement.
British war aims in the Middle East
Britain sought to wrap its own predatory aims in the Middle East in pledges of independence for the Arabs and a homeland for the Jews—under Britain’s tutelage—in return for support against the Ottoman Empire, Germany’s ally in the war. The Balfour Declaration aimed at winning the support of Jews not just in Britain, but also in America and Palestine for the war effort.
Britain believed that the establishment of such a homeland, in effect a small Jewish colony in Palestine, would secure a client regime in a strategic location that would join the various parts of the British Empire from the Atlantic to the middle of the Pacific, and above all the Suez Canal and India. It would also provide an excuse for intervention in the region and counter France’s claims in the region via its support for the Maronites (Roman Catholics) in present day Lebanon.
While the letter bore the signature of Lord Balfour, the driving force behind the Declaration was the new Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George, a former Radical and opponent of the war who had become an arch-imperialist. Having unseated Herbert Asquith as prime minister at the end of 1916, as war losses in Europe and the Middle East mounted, Lloyd George moved quickly to impose a war dictatorship, establish a five-man war cabinet and order British forces in Egypt to launch an offensive and acquire Palestine for Britain.
His aim was to destroy the Turkish Empire and gain control of territory in the Middle East—not just for the land route to India but for colonial expansion. This would be at the expense of France, which under the secret Tripartite agreement between Britain, France and Russia in 1916 (the Sykes-Picot agreement) would gain Syria and Lebanon, while Britain would take Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Russia would take Constantinople and parts of the Ottoman Empire.
This secret deal was one of many made public by the Bolshevik government after the seizure of power in October 1917.
The new foreign policy contradicted London’s promise in 1915 to the Hashemite Sherif Hussein of Mecca, in what later became known as the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, of independence for the territories now known as Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, in return for organising the Arab Revolt against the Turks.
The promise of a Jewish home in Palestine was therefore one of a series of secret, fraudulent and mutually irreconcilable agreements designed to bring the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire, with their oil supplies and trade, under British control.
In line with Lloyd George’s determination to take control of the Ottoman Empire, his war cabinet was attempting to secretly bribe Turkey’s rulers to end their participation in the war and conclude a separate peace treaty with Britain. Under the terms of such a treaty, Britain would gain de facto control over Mesopotamia, Syria and Lebanon, over which the Turkish flag would continue to fly. Turkey’s leaders rebuffed Britain after the new Bolshevik government in Russia, Turkey’s longstanding enemy, announced an armistice and peace based on freedom of the nationalities.
Lloyd George and Zionism
Lloyd George was one of a long-line of Christian Zionists in Britain. He had acted as the legal representative of the Austrian journalist Dr. Theodore Herzl, when he sought in 1903 to secure British support for a Jewish homeland in Sinai. That same year the British government offered to allow for Jewish emigration to Uganda, Britain’s colony in East Africa—a proposal that was seriously discussed by the Zionists before being rejected in 1906.
Herzl had first set out his proposal for a national homeland for the Jews in 1896 as the solution to the persecution and oppression faced by European Jewry at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century—a period characterised by extreme bourgeois reaction, militarism, imperialism and virulent anti-Semitism. Part of a second wave of nationalist movements, after the consolidation of Italy and Germany by 1870, it came too late in the development of capitalism to have any progressive tendencies.
The Zionist project entailed the creation of a Jewish national project within a political entity where they constituted a tiny minority and faced Ottoman restrictions on immigration and land acquisition and increasing opposition to its expansion from the majority Arab population. Such an entity, which could only be established by force and violence at the expense of the existing inhabitants, was based on profoundly undemocratic foundations: the denial of the rights of non-Jews already living there.
From the outset the Zionist project aroused opposition and was always going to be dependent upon Great Power support.
The Zionists justified the Jewish claims to Palestine and nationhood in terms of Biblical history, with the claim that they had been expelled from their homeland nearly 2,000 years earlier. But the prime hope of most Jews was not for a “return” to Palestine, but emancipation and the attainment of basic democratic rights in the West. Other Jews voted with their feet, with some 2.4 million fleeing the persecution, social misery and economic hardship of Eastern Europe between 1882 and 1914, mostly to the US. Fewer than 3 percent went to Palestine and many of these soon left.
The British government’s attitude towards the Jews and the Zionist project went through several twists and turns. The early discussions between Balfour, Chamberlain and Herzl took place against a background of moves towards the 1905 Aliens Act, introducing immigration controls and giving the Home Secretary overall responsibility for immigration and nationality matters. One of its main objectives was to control Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. Supporting a movement dedicated to encouraging the Jews to settle elsewhere, while possibly even strengthening Britain’s hand in Africa, was an attractive proposition.
Britain became receptive to the idea of Jewish resettlement in Palestine after Turkey entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria. The Balfour Declaration was the outcome of extensive lobbying for a Jewish state over several years by Zionists in Britain, notably Dr. Chaim Weizmann, a Russian-born chemist whose work at the University of Manchester made an important contribution to the war effort. He won the support of the upper echelons of British Jewry and through them access to key foreign policy officials such as Sir Mark Sykes, who had negotiated the Sykes-Picot Treaty. They called for the government to make a public commitment to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and thus overturn the secret plans to assign Palestine, as part of Syria, to France after the war.
Impact of the Balfour Declaration
The Balfour Declaration gave succour to a small minority of “political” Zionists led by the journalist and writer Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), who went on to form the Revisionist Party that was later to orient towards the fascists in Germany, Italy and Spain in the 1930s. The Revisionist Party was the political antecedent of Likud, which has dominated Israeli politics for the last 40 years.
Jabotinsky argued that the Jews had to “take political possession of Palestine” if they were to become the majority. To this end, he demanded and won British consent to form three Jewish battalions, comprising the Jewish Legion, that fought with Britain’s General Allenby in the campaign for Palestine in 1917-18. These forces were later to form the Irgun and the Stern gang and play a key role in terrorist activities aimed at driving the Palestinian Arabs from their homes.
While Weizmann was unhappy that the Declaration made no mention of a Jewish state, he made strenuous efforts to ensure that the promise was embedded in the political arrangements made after the war.
Soon after British troops took Palestine, he led a delegation on a visit to the area, known as the Zionist Commission, that included James Rothschild and Edwin Samuel, whose father would go on to become the first British High Commissioner in Mandatory Palestine. He laid a cornerstone for what would become the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, on land owned by the World Zionist Organization, and established the foundations of what would eventually become the institutions of a government in waiting.
It was far from clear who would rule Palestine after the war as the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 left the boundaries vague, leading to a struggle between Britain and France. The region was convulsed with uprisings against imperialist rule in Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan and Persia. Weizmann was determined to ensure that Britain took sole charge of Palestine. However, at the same time 14 armies, including Britain’s, were supporting the Whites, the Russian opponents of the Bolshevik revolution. Britain was seriously overstretched.
When the Allies convened in Paris in 1919 to draw up a treaty to present to Germany, the Soviet government was not invited. But the spectre of the October Revolution haunted the Peace Conference. Lloyd George’s letter to French President Clemenceau set out his fears:
“The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent but of anger and revolution amongst the workmen against pre-war conditions. The whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other.”
— source http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/07/balf-n07.html by Jean Shaoul 2017-11-07
An indication of the political conceptions underpinning British imperialism’s support for Zionism may be gleaned from the remarks of Winston Churchill in February 1920, just before he became Colonial Secretary. He praised what he called the “national Jews” of Russia, the bankers and industrialists, and excoriated the “international Jews.”
Churchill backed Zionism as an antidote to Bolshevism and international communism, saying, “The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.”
He called for full backing for Zionism and declared that a British-protected Zionist state in Palestine “would from every point of view be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.”
In the event, Britain secured the support of its wartime allies—with the obvious exception of Russia. The 1920 San Remo Treaty, an outgrowth of the Paris conference, recognised Britain’s seizure of Palestine, and in 1922, the League of Nations gave Britain Mandatory control over Palestine, west of the Jordan River.
East of the Jordan or Transjordan, now Jordan, would be ruled by one of the sons of the Hashemite Sherif Hussein of Mecca, under British “protection,” as a reward for leading a revolt against the Turks—dividing Palestine into two small and impoverished entities.
The Mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration, making it a legally binding international instrument subject to the League of Nations (and thus the imperialist powers), and obliging Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration and encourage settlement in Palestine. It cited “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” that formed “grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”
It was the Mandate by the League of Nations, signed by the major powers, not the Balfour Declaration per se, that gave the seal of approval for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in terms of international relations and international law.
The Mandatory system was designed to give colonialism a more modern guise. Instead of simply dividing up the conquered territories between themselves, the victors, Britain and France, would act as “trustees” for “backward” peoples while supposedly preparing them for independence. This arrangement fully justified Lenin’s claim that the League of Nations was a “thieves’ kitchen.”
While it also required that the rights of other sections of the population should not be prejudiced, the clear thrust of the Mandate for Palestine was the fulfilment of the Zionist programme. It was vehemently opposed by the Palestinians and the Arabs more broadly. Sherif Hussein of Mecca and other Arab leaders viewed the Declaration as a violation of Britain’s previous commitment made in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence in exchange for launching the Arab Revolt.
The Mandate also provided for the establishment of a Jewish Agency—tantamount to a government-in-waiting of the Jews in Palestine—to represent the Jewish people and advise and co-operate with the British administration. The Jewish Agency was dominated by the Labour Zionists, who wrapped their nationalism in a socialist colouration and harnessed Jewish workers to the yoke of the national bourgeoisie and its mission of carving out a capitalist state entity in Palestine.
After Britain took control of Palestine in December 1917, it began to allow immigration into the country in the face of bitter opposition from the Arabs. But immigration in significant numbers only began when the plight of the Jews in postwar Europe became truly desperate and after the US introduced laws barring entry to the Jews in 1922.
The first mass influx of refugees came from Poland in 1923-26 and then from Germany and Eastern Europe in 1933-36 as the Jews sought to escape Nazi persecution.
Britain prevaricated and repeatedly shifted its policies, supporting at one time the Jews, immigration into Palestine and Jewish nationalism and at another the Arabs and Arab nationalism.
The enormous influence of the October Revolution led a number of Palestinian Jews to form the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP) in 1921. But the PCP was divided between the Jews who formed the majority and an Arab minority, and was subject to frequent splits. It was never able to counter either the Revisionists or the Labour Zionists. The Stalinist bureaucracy later used the PCP as an instrument of its own foreign policy needs. The nationalist twists and turns of Stalinism had a disastrous impact on the PCP, leading to its increasing disorientation and splintering into two separate parties, for Jews and Arabs.
After World War II, Britain proposed a bi-national state. When both Arabs and Jews rejected this and the terrorist activities of the Revisionists against both the Arabs and the British administration made Palestine ungovernable, Britain referred the conflict to the newly formed United Nations that had succeeded the League of Nations.
By this time Britain’s status in world affairs had diminished, making it impossible to resolve the conflict on its own terms. The US and the Soviet Union supported the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state for their own purposes: Both saw it as a way of blocking Britain’s position in the Middle East.
At the same time, millions of people around the world were appalled at the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews—many of whom were barred from entering the US and Britain and were still languishing in displaced persons camps in Europe. They therefore viewed the establishment of a Jewish state with sympathy.
The horrors of the concentration camps thus played a crucial role in Israel’s birth. Furthermore, the accompanying rhetoric sought to equate Zionism with the labour movement, equality and socialism to legitimise it in the eyes of class-conscious workers.
The UN voted for the partition of Palestine in 1947, hailing it as a new and progressive entity dedicated to building a democratic and egalitarian society for the most cruelly oppressed people of Europe.
Now, some 70 years later, what is the historical and political record of Zionism?
Israel was founded in 1948 on the forcible expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, transforming most of historic Palestine into the Jewish state of Israel and most Palestinians into refugees. This was not just the result of a war that led people to flee their homes but the explicit policy of the political antecedents of the present Likud government that was given the nod by Israel’s founding father and first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, as Israeli historians have acknowledged. Those that remained became a Palestinian minority in Israel that faced increasing political economic, social and cultural discrimination.
One of five states (Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) carved out of the former Syrian province of the Ottoman Empire, Israel was surrounded by hostile states, with few natural resources and little water, and isolated from the wider regional economy. The Arab regimes refused to trade with Israel and boycotted those companies that did so. Such a tiny capitalist state was never economically viable. This is one of the reasons why successive governments sought to expand Israel’s borders, leading to bitter warfare and enmity with its Arab neighbours and repeated economic crises.
Israel has fought numerous wars, included major conflicts with neighbouring Arab states in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973; invasions of Lebanon in 1978, 1982 and 2006, and attacks on Gaza in 2006, 2008-9, 2012 and 2014.
It was initially kept afloat by the Diaspora, which contributed $200 million a year before 1967 and a massive $700 million a year in the following six years. Today, Israel receives more than $1.5 billion a year from private US donations. In the 1950s, German reparations money provided another important source of finance: $125 million a year before 1966.
But by far the largest economic assistance has come from the US government. While before 1967, Washington provided very little, about $50 million a year, this rose to a massive $3 billion a year by 1986 (split between $1.2 billion economic and $1.8 billion military assistance), plus some $500 million a year in aid from other parts of the US budget or in some cases, off-budget. Last year, the outgoing Obama administration agreed to provide $3.8 billion a year for 10 years, making Israel the highest per capita recipient of US aid in the world.
US military assistance to Israel came only after Israel became stronger than all the Arab armies, and ruled over the Palestinian population. It increased after every military intervention and suppression of the Palestinians, before and after the Oslo peace talks and their collapse.
Its purpose is to ensure Israel’s military superiority as a US garrison in the oil-rich region. In effect, Israel replaced Britain after its withdrawal in the late 1960s from “East of Suez” as the policeman of the Middle East on behalf of US imperialism.
Israel has openly defied numerous UN resolutions and repeatedly breached international law in relation to the West Bank and Gaza, illegally occupied since 1967. It has appropriated territory to itself, including East Jerusalem, Syria’s Golan Heights, and land and villages for more than 200 settlements in the West Bank. Its armed forces have violently suppressed any manifestation of protest by the Palestinians and carried out numerous incursions into Palestinian cities. Israeli troops and Zionist settlers killed more than 2,000 Palestinians, the great majority unarmed civilians and many of them children in the first intifada that started in 1987, at least 4,500 in the second intifada between 2000 and 2005, and around 235 in the third intifada or “stabbing intifada” in 2015-16.
The Israel Defense Forces have demolished homes, destroyed farms, uprooted olive groves, closed roads and instituted curfews, crippling the Palestinian economy and bringing people to the brink of starvation. The conditions for the vast majority of those who live in the Gaza Strip, separated off from Israel by means an electrified barbed wire fence and blockaded by Israel for the last 10 years, and latterly by Egypt, resemble a giant concentration camp.
Within Israel itself, the government conducts a policy towards Arab Israelis reminiscent of the apartheid regime. Netanyahu is set to introduce a package of laws that would further undermine their position. The proposed Nationality Law would define Israel as belonging to a global Jewish nation rather than its citizens, ending the pretence it is a liberal democracy. It would also downgrade the status of Arabic, spoken by one fifth of Israel’s population and require the courts to give considerable weight to Jewish religious law and Jewish heritage.
The expansion of the settlements, the murderous war against the Palestinians and the discrimination against Israel’s Palestinian citizens have come at an enormous cost to the Israeli working class. Market-based reforms, privatisations, cuts in social benefits, the raising of the pension age, cuts in corporate taxes and income taxes for the rich, anti-trade union laws, restrictions on the right to strike and a ban on strikes in the public sector have brought unremitting misery, unemployment and poverty to increasing numbers of workers and their families.
While GDP per capita has risen, the benefits of growth have gone to a few while real average wages per capita have fallen. In 2015, the average CEO pay was 44 times the average wage (NIS 9,592) and 91 times the minimum wage (NIS 4,650). One-third of workers earn the minimum wage or less.
Nearly one in five families, whose income is less than 50 percent of the median family income in Israel, are officially poor. The poverty rate among Israeli Palestinians is about three times that of Jewish Israelis, where the highest poverty rate is found among ultra-Orthodox Jews.
These outcomes are a far cry from the safe haven, free from oppression, discrimination and inequality, that the creation of Israel was meant to offer Jews in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. They flow inexorably from the Zionist project of establishing a capitalist state based on the dispossession of another people and maintained by war and repression abroad and social exploitation and inequality at home. Such a state is incapable of providing the foundations for establishing social justice and equality, even for its own citizens.
Every national movement in the Middle East, Africa and Asia has failed to resolve the fundamental social, economic and political problems confronting the mass of working people. The Zionist state that the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent machinations of the major powers spawned has been a terrible and failed experiment. Its continuation promises only further oppression for both Palestinians and Israelis, and further wars.
The only way out of the current impasse is the development of a political movement to unite Arab and Jewish workers and intellectuals in a common struggle against capitalism and for the building of a socialist society. This is the only way to redress the historic injustices suffered by the Palestinian workers and peasants, and end the oppression and war fuelled by the profit drive of international capital and the Israeli and Arab national ruling cliques.
The creation of a United Socialist States of the Middle East would remove the artificial borders imposed by imperialist intrigues that presently divide the peoples and economies of the region, and enable its rich resources to be utilised for the benefit of all.
— source wsws.org by Jean Shaoul 2017-11-09