Last year, on the 95th anniversary of the
Balfour Declaration, the former Palestinian minister, Nabil Shaath,
wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph attacking Britain for issuing
its famous statement of support for the establishment in Eretz Yisrael
of a national home for the Jewish people. Shaath called the Balfour
Declaration, which was issued by Britain's Foreign Secretary Arthur
James Balfour on November 2, 1917, the beginning of "British
imperialism" in Palestine.
At the heart of what he called Britain's "sins
in Palestine" was the promise of this territory to the Jewish people,
who, in the words of Shaath, "did not even live there." For him there
was no Jewish history in Palestine, that needed to be acknowledged but
only "colonial conspiracies" against the Arab residents living there.
The rise of the Jewish national home, in short, was the product of
external manipulations by outside powers, like Britain, and not the
result of any authentic yearning of the Jews themselves. With the
anniversary of the declaration again upon us, it is important to
understand how Balfour's act still confounds Palestinian leaders who are
prepared to distort its significance.
What Shaath and other Palestinian spokesmen
found so objectionable about the Balfour Declaration was that it
constituted the first step in a long effort to get the historical rights
of the Jewish people to their homeland acknowledged by the
international community. That recognition actually required a tough
diplomatic struggle by the leaders of the Zionist movement during the
First World War and in the years that followed.
Britain was not the only state involved. For
example on June 4, 1917, they received a letter from the French foreign
minister, Jules Cambon, who wrote: "...it would be a deed of justice and
of reparation to assist, by the protection of the Allied Powers, in the
renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that Land from which the
people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago."
It turned out to be much more difficult to
extract language that strong in the British cabinet at that time. What
became the Balfour Declaration went through a number of drafts during
the summer and fall of 1917. The original language of the declaration
that was approved by the British foreign office and Prime Minister Lloyd
George on September 19, 1917 specifically stated that Britain accepted
the principle that "Palestine should be reconstituted as the national
home of the Jewish people."
Use of the term "reconstitute" meant that the
land was once their homeland before and should now be restored to them.
It meant that the Jews had historical rights. For that reason, this
language had been sought by the Zionist leadership led by Chaim Weizmann
and Nahum Sokolow who wanted it indicated that the Jewish people had a
historical connection to their land. This original formula had been
approved by President Woodrow Wilson, to whom the text was submitted in
advance.
It was not such a far-fetched goal to seek
formal acknowledgement of Jewish historical rights. A little over two
decades earlier a well-connected Protestant clergyman from Chicago,
Reverend William Blackstone, received broad backing for a petition for a
Jewish homeland signed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the
speaker of the House of Representatives, university presidents and the
editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Top
industrialists, like John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, also lent
their support. In short, the idea of the Jewish people re-establishing
their country had become acceptable in the elite sectors of the American
establishment.
Blackstone's petition specifically
characterized the connection of the Jewish people to Eretz Israel as "an
inalienable possession from which they were expelled by force." In
other words, the Jewish people had not willingly given up their claim to
their land. Indeed, there was no act in which they relinquished title
to the Romans or their successors; in fact from the Bar Kokhba revolt in
135 C.E. until the Muslim conquests, there were Jewish resistance
movements that tried to recover Jerusalem, and afterwards a constant
stream of Jewish immigrants followed.
Blackstone may have not known all this but he
touched upon the idea that there were historical rights of the Jewish
people, which were recognized at the time he sought signatories to his
petition. The petition was submitted to President Benjamin Harrison in
1891 and in another version to President Wilson in 1917, with the aim of
influencing his attitude to the Balfour Declaration.
Despite the growing popularity of the idea in
the West, there were British opponents to making any commitment to a
Jewish national home. This group sought to water down the language of
what was to become the Balfour Declaration. Edwin Montagu, the secretary
of state for India and the only Jewish member of the British cabinet
ironically lead the internal fight against what Balfour was doing.
Montagu feared that acknowledging Jewish
rights in Eretz Israel would lead to the denial of Jewish rights to live
in Britain or elsewhere in the Diaspora. He was also ideologically
committed to Jewish assimilation. So under his influence all references
to the Jewish people "reconstituting" their homeland were dropped. He
announced at the time: "I assert that there is not a Jewish nation." He
moreover insisted: "I deny that Palestine today is associated with the
Jews." Montagu could not stop the Balfour Declaration, so he tried to
weaken its contents. It is not surprising that Shaath makes Montagu the
hero of his analysis.
In any case, the Balfour Declaration was
basically a statement of British policy; it did not establish legal
rights. This first occurred with the meeting of the victorious allied
powers at San Remo, Italy in 1920, where they adopted the Balfour
Declaration in an international agreement. Then in 1922, 51 members of
the League of Nations approved the document for the Palestine Mandate.
The Mandate document restored important
elements that had been taken out of the Balfour Declaration as a result
of the debate in the British cabinet, for it stated: "...recognition has
thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people
with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home
in that country." The British Government issued a White Paper in 1922
that further clarified this point by saying that the Jewish national
home "should be formally recognized to rest upon ancient historic
connection."
Nabil Shaath wanted his British readers last
year to believe that the process that began with the Balfour Declaration
in 1917 and ending up with the British Mandate in 1922 created the
Jewish claim to a homeland. For him the Jewish homeland was entirely
invented by British imperial interests and had no historical roots. In
short, it was an illegitimate claim.
But that is a distortion of what happened for
what was involved at the time was a British recognition of a
pre-existing right. Moreover that British recognition was fully accepted
by the international community by 1922, through the League of Nations.
Finally, it must be added, that those rights were not suspended when the
League of Nations was disbanded, but rather they were transferred to
the United Nations, which replaced it.
In summary, Shaath refuses to acknowledge the steady buildup of the
Jewish national home over the centuries; the Ottoman census already
showed a Jewish majority in Safed in the 16th century. European consular
reports in the 19th century showed that by the 1860s the Jews
re-established their majority in Jerusalem -- decades before British
armies took over the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration reflected a
historical trend that was already underway, but it did not launch the
Jewish return to Eretz Israel. This return was a product of the national
will of a people which Shaath and his colleagues still refuse to
recognize, thereby perpetuating the conflict with Israel to this day. 
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