By Jim Miles
(The Balfour Declaration - The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Jonathan Schneer Anchor Canada. Random House, Toronto, 2012.)
This is the best that academic political history gets. More than simply the dates and the ‘facts’, Jonathan Schneer is able to give some personality to the characters involved, including the all too human factors of lying, deceit, and manipulation that many political histories miss. The title, given to the letter that carried the name, The Balfour Declaration covers all the actors in the scene from the European empires, the Ottoman empire, the European Zionists, and the Arab politicians of the Middle East. Lord Balfour himself certainly played a large part in the affairs of the world during that epoch, but the declaration itself owes its existence to these many other players and their machinations within the destructive chaos of World War I.
History
The cynicism, manipulation, and backstabbing is clear throughout the history. Before the Arabs joined in hostilities directed at the Turks, Egyptian High Commissioner Henry McMahon stated, “we have to…tempt the Arab people into the right path, detach them form the enemy and bring them on to our side. This on our part is at present largely a matter of words…we must use persuasive terms and abstain from academic haggling over conditions.” In a later comment in the work, Schneer says these “telegrams…inadvertently revealed the hopes, contradictions, tensions, guile, and prejudices now at work in shaping British and Allied wartime policy toward both the Jews and Arabs.”
The history rests on these manipulations and “nebulous” proposals. The British wanted the Arabs on their side; they also wanted control of Palestine and Mesopotamia (Basra, Baghdad, Mosul). The French also wanted a share of the same region (mostly Syria, a largely undefined region at the time), and Britain wanted to limit their influence. The Arabs of course wanted their own governance out from under the Ottoman Turkish rule; they were willing to allow a very limited British and French presence, at the same time knowing they needed their military assistance to get rid of the Turkish military. There were early signs “of the incomprehension with which some important Britons initially pursued two mutually exclusive policies,” from which as is generally the case, no one is satisfied.
The Jewish people were divided significantly between “assimilationists” - those thinking that assimilation and remaining as a Britain who is a Jew as compared to a Jew who happens to be in Britain - and the “nationalists” - Zionists who worked for their own national state in Palestine. The British and the French overestimated the power of Jewish political influence and played this misguided feature (as did the Jews) to help in their victory over Germany, the Turks, and for Jewish support at home.
Familiar Patterns
Throughout the history the parallels with later and more contemporary ideas concerning Israel and Palestine are obvious - at least for those familiar with the more contemporary scene.
The first idea is demographics, always a concern for the Jewish population in Palestine/Israel. The many comments of later Zionists about needing a majority in the land (which contradicts any claims of a land without people) was understood by the very early Zionists. Already looking to the future, the Earl of Crewe (Asquith’s secretary in India) noted from the British side, “when in the course of time the Jewish colonists in Palestine grow strong enough to cope with the Arab population they may be allowed to take the management of the internal affairs of Palestine…into their own hands.” As Schneer commented, “Weizmann could have asked for little more.”
Another concept carried forward and still emphasized today is that of Jewish superiority over the Arabs in all aspects. Asher Ginzberg noted, “We are used to thinking of the Arabs as primitive men of the desert, as a donkey-like nature that neither sees nor understands what is going on around it,” and ends with a warning, “But that is a great error.” He further warned against the “ ‘repressive cruelty’ employed by Zionists in their dealings with Arabs,” in 1891, well before events of WW I and the current repression in Palestine.
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