In the face of genocide: a document of shame
Today, November 2nd is the 107th anniversary of one of the darkest days in the bloody history of the British Empire. For exactly 107 years ago today the then British Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour, a Christian Zionist Lord wrote a personal letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, a Jewish Zionist Lord, in which he gifted him Palestine as a ‘homeland’ for the Jews.
The fact that Palestine at the time was not under British rule, that they had no deed to it or mandate and had no right to gift it to other people, did not bother his Lordship. Palestine, at the time, had been an Arab country for many centuries, populated by Arab Muslims and Christians (95%) with a small minority of Jews (5%) Yet, despite the caveat in Lord Balfour’s letter which reads, “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, all 95% of the population, Lord Balfour and his peers and Zionist Christian colleagues had no intention of honouring this caveat. The interests of the Empire must be served no matter what. As he said, in private of course, to Lord Curzon, who succeeded him:
“Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, and is of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
What prejudices was his Lordship referring to, I wonder? Didn’t we, in Palestine, Moslems, Christians and Jews, live together in peace and harmony for centuries? Instead, Lord Balfour conveniently forgot his own prejudices and those of his peers and countrymen, when in 1905, as Prime Minister of Great Britain, he introduced ‘the aliens bill’. The main purpose of which was to prohibit the entry into the UK of immigrants, especially the impoverished Jews of Eastern Europe.
What better way to get rid of them than to send them to Palestine? A glaringly obvious case of NIMBY or Not In My Backyard.
Jewish Israeli historian and Oxford Professor, Avi Shlaim described the Balfour Declaration as “ both immoral and illegal”. Yet the British Raj in the person of the then Secretary of State for Colonies, Winston Churchill, continued to show utter disregard for the wishes and aspirations of the Palestinians. In 1937, Churchill’s remarks, after the Peel Report, were as racist and dismissive of the Palestinian Nation as could be.
“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
The intentions of the Jewish Zionists was made clear by the father of right-wing Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky who in his essay of 1923, ‘The Iron Wall – Us and The Arabs’ made it clear that force was the only way to create the Zionist dream in Palestine. He wrote:
“ Zionist colonisation must be carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonisation can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.”
This Iron Wall policy, aided and abetted by first, the then colonial power, Great Britain, and adopted and continued by the now prevailing power, the United States of America, has been the modus operandi of concurrent Israeli governments. The so-called war of independence in 1948, the tripartite (Israel, France and Britain) attack on Egypt in1956, the six-day war of 1967 all were designed to acquire land by force and compel the Arabs to accept a ‘fait accompli’ from a position of weakness.
As a result we have the 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the 1993 Oslo Accord between the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Israel to be closely followed by the 1994 Wadi Araba peace treaty between Jordan and Israel. All reached and signed from the point of strength on the Israeli side and the point of weakness on the Arab side.
During Donald Trump’s first Presidency, the fragmentation and division in the Arab world was brought to unprecedented levels by the so-called Abraham Accords, calling for normalisation between Arab countries and Israel. President Trump, in a side-ways jibe to those various Arab leaders, singled out the most powerful and richest of all, Saudi Arabia, when he said, “We protect Saudi Arabia. Would you say they’re rich? And I love the King, King Salman. But I said, ‘King, we’re protecting you. You might not be there for two weeks without us. You have to pay for your military.” Fearing the truth of this statement many Arab leaders, UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco instantly fell into line, and signed those humiliating accords. What stopped Saudi Arabia, in my opinion, was when Hamas breached the Iron Wall on October 7th 2023, attacking Israel, and the savage and sadistic response of the Israeli army which still continues.
General Moshe Dayan, Israel’s most celebrated general and hero of the 6-day war, once said, “Israel must be like a mad dog. Too dangerous to bother.”
Now the mad dog has sunk its fangs into Lebanon. With the same savagery and brutality as it inflicted on Gaza.
Despite all of this, we the Palestinian people, having suffered immensely for the last century or so, are still standing fast, resisting our occupiers, resisting our rulers, resisting the betrayal of our so-called Arab and Muslim brethren and all the pressures that have been brought upon us by all, especially by the United States of America.
In the last year, in the face of a genocide unfolding in front of their very eyes, western opinion is changing. Everyday we witness hundreds of thousands of citizens of the world going against their governments’ wishes and policies and marching in the streets, calling for justice and freedom for Palestine. What Israel has been getting away with for 76 years, with impunity, might be coming to an end. This tide of change is most noticeable amongst the young and in particular, the Jewish younger generation in the US who are saying “not in my name’ and asking the question, “If not now, then when?”
“The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy or the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world’s peace.”
Arnold Toynbee, British historian.