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ForeignPolicyJournal.com: What Was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and Why Is It Significant?

Posted by: Berhane Habtemariam

Date: Thursday, 16 November 2017

What Was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and Why Is It Significant?

By Jeremy R. Hammond |

Nov 15, 2017 | Editor's Picks, Essays, Palestine, Politics | 1 |

https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Mayor_of_Tel_Aviv_showing_the_city_to_Lord_Balfour.jpg
 

Lord Arthur Balfour in Tel Aviv, c. 1925 (from the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection at the Library of Congress)

Contents

I. The Conquest of Palestine

Zionist Influence on British Policy

Promises of Arab Independence

The Balfour Propaganda

II. The Colonization of Palestine

Reassurances of Arab Independence

The Treaty of Versailles

The King-Crane Commission

The San Remo Resolution

The Treaty of Sèvres

Zionism’s Failure to Convince

Zionist Land Policies

The Churchill White Paper

III. The Zionist Mandate for Palestine

The Formulation of the Mandate

Britain’s Miscalculation

The ‘Compulsory Transfer’

Conclusion

Afterword

References

The Balfour Declaration determined British policy under the League of Nations’ Mandate, which ultimately facilitated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

One-hundred years ago today, the famous—or infamous—“Balfour Declaration” was issued by the government of Great Britain. While most people with basic knowledge about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have heard of this document, few understand what it really was, why it is so significant, and why it remains so relevant today.

The main reason for this lack of understanding among the public is that the history taught in the United States and other Western countries systematically misrepresents the conflict’s historical origins. The US government and mainstream media present a narrative lifted wholesale from Israeli propaganda about how the “Jewish state” came into existence, while the Palestinian perspective is hardly acknowledged.

Reflecting this deeply ingrained prejudice against the Palestinians, British Prime Minister Theresa May earlier this week glorified the Balfour Declaration by proclaiming, “We are proud of the role that we played in the creation of [the] state of Israel and we will certainly mark the centenary with pride.”[1]

The Balfour Declaration, however, is no cause for celebration among the Palestinians, who fully grasp its true significance. Acting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in July spoke about suing Britain over the Balfour Declaration by observing, accurately, that it determined a course of policy that ultimately culminated in over 700,000 Arabs being ethnically cleansed from their homes in Palestine.[2]

After the First World War, under the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, Britain was appointed to rule over the conquered territory of the former Ottoman Empire. The Mandate actually incorporated the language of the Balfour Declaration, which determined the nature of Great Britain’s rule over Palestine’s inhabitants. While freed from the yoke of Turkish rule, the Palestinians were even more oppressed under Britain’s occupation regime.

The basic premise of British policy under the Mandate was that the right of the majority Arab inhabitants to self-determination must be denied in order for Palestine to be reconstituted as a “Jewish State”. Under the Mandate, it was to the organized Zionist movement that the British pledged their active support, with great prejudice toward the rights of the Arabs, despite meaningless rhetoric to the contrary.

British policymakers understood that the Zionists aimed to disenfranchise and, ultimately, to displace Arabs from the land, but this was cause for no concern—at least, not at first. Over time, however, British officials became perplexed at what they perceived as Arab ingratitude toward their benevolent rule, as represented by their unwillingness to accept Britain’s rejection of their right to self-determination. While there were those Arabs willing to collaborate with the British regime, the Arab leadership consisted mostly of “extremists” who insisted upon independence and democratic governance.

The British policy of supporting the Zionist project naturally led to unrest among the Arab population. Outbreaks of violence began to occur. As the conflict caused by its guiding policy escalated, the British sought to extract themselves from the situation. So, in 1947, Britain turned to the United Nations, which had taken over the international trusteeship system for territories held under Mandate by the defunct League of Nations.

The solution the UN came up with to resolve the conflict was to partition Palestine into two separate states: one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. The famous UN “Partition Plan”, however, was inherently inequitable and, in fact, was premised on the same rejection of Palestinians’ rights that underlay British policy.

The Arabs naturally refused to consent to this abuse, and the partition plan was never implemented. So the Zionist leadership had to resort to other means. War broke out and, in order to establish their demographically “Jewish state”, the Zionist forces ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their homes. This “compulsory transfer” of Arabs hard first been proposed by a British commission of inquiry in 1937, since which the idea had become central to the thinking of the Zionist leadership.

The Balfour Declaration’s significance is that it set British policy on a course grounded in a fundamental rejection of the rights of the Arab Palestinians. This rejection of their rights ultimately manifested in a crime that was not unforeseen: the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine.

It this fundamental rejection of Palestinians’ rights that remains the underlying root cause of the conflict that persists to this day.................

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