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Slow Colonial Genocide: Palestinian Leader Abbas Asks Britain for "Balfour"
Apology
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/colonial_genocide_palestinian_abbas_brit
ain_balfour_apology_20160923/
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Posted on Sep 23, 2016
By Juan Cole(http://www.truthdig.com/staff/juan_cole) / Informed
Comment(http://www.juancole.com/2016/09/colonial-genocide-palestinian.html)
A separation wall in Palestine. (Flickr / CC
2.0(https://www.flickr.com/photos/missykel/434056845/) )
Mahmoud Abbas, president of Palestine, is asking Britain for an
apology(http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN11S2CZ?il=0) for its
having in 1917 issued the infamous "Balfour Declaration." He won't get one.
The difference between the North Atlantic countries and the rest of the
world is that the former are still committed to some key colonial
arrangements made at the height of imperialism, which are perceived still to
benefit the "West" in its grand strategy. Virtually no one in the rest of
the world actively supports (as do the US and the UK) the continued
expropriation of the Palestinians except the North Atlantic crowd, who
perceive Israel as their human air craft carrier menacing the Middle East.
(I know that the U.S. and the UK occasionally make tut tut noises about
Israeli squatter settlements on Palestinian land; these noises cannot be
taken seriously given the billions in aid and other backing they proffer Tel
Aviv.)
On the occasion of this entirely justified demand by Palestine, I'll share a
couple of my posts that delve into the significance of that declaration,
which led to settler-colonialism in the British Mandate of Palestine and to
the current Apartheid state in Israel-Palestine and the statelessness and
oppression at the hands of Israelis of millions of Palestinians. This
extended colonialism is unparalleled in the whole world: no other colonial
power now existing is keeping millions stateless and without the right to
have rights. And let me point out that British authorities were told by the
European Powers after Versailles that the Balfour Declaration was not the
basis for a legal claim of Zionist Jews to Palestine and that, moreover,
British high officials agreed with this objection. That is, the legislative
history does not even support the conventional Zionist interpretation of
Balfour to begin with. See Lord Curzon's memo below:
. . . I [had] mirrored a map of modern Palestinian history that has the
virtue of showing graphically what has happened to the Palestinians
politically and territorially in the past century.
Andrew Sullivan then mirrored the map from my
site(http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/03/goldblog-splutter
s/189381/) , which set off a lot of thunder and noise among anti-Palestinian
writers like Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, but shed very little light.
(PS, the map as a hard copy mapcard is available from
Sabeel(http://www.fosna.org/content/mapcards) .)
The map is useful and accurate. It begins by showing the British Mandate of
Palestine as of the mid-1920s. The British conquered the Ottoman districts
that came to be the Mandate during World War I (the Ottoman sultan threw in
with Austria and Germany against Britain, France and Russia, mainly out of
fear of Russia).
But because of the rise of the League of Nations and the influence of
President Woodrow Wilson's ideas about self-determination, Britain and
France could not decently simply make their new, previously Ottoman
territories into mere colonies. The League of Nations awarded them
"Mandates." Britain got Palestine, France got Syria (which it made into
Syria and Lebanon), Britain got Iraq.
The League of Nations Covenant spelled out what a Class A
Mandate(http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1919versailles.html)
(i.e. territory that had been Ottoman) was:
Article 22. Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire
have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent
nations can be provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of
administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory [i.e., a Western power]
until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these
communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the
Mandatory.
That is, the purpose of the later British Mandate of Palestine, of the
French Mandate of Syria, of the British Mandate of Iraq, was to 'render
administrative advice and assistance" to these peoples in preparation for
their becoming independent states, an achievement that they were recognized
as not far from attaining. The Covenant was written before the actual
Mandates were established, but Palestine was a Class A Mandate and so the
language of the Covenant was applicable to it. The territory that formed the
British Mandate of Iraq was the same territory that became independent Iraq,
and the same could have been expected of the British Mandate of Palestine.
(Even class B Mandates like Togo have become nation-states, but the poor
Palestinians are just stateless prisoners in colonial cantons).
The first map thus shows what the League of Nations imagined would become
the state of Palestine. The economist published an odd assertion that the
Negev Desert was 'empty' and should not have been shown in the first map.
But it wasn't and isn't empty; Palestinian Bedouin live there, and they and
the desert were recognized by the League of Nations as belonging to the
Mandate of Palestine, a state-in-training. The Mandate of Palestine also had
a charge to allow for the establishment of a 'homeland' in Palestine for
Jews (because of the 1917 Balfour Declaration), but nobody among League of
Nations officialdom at that time imagined it would be a whole and competing
territorial state. There was no prospect of more than a few tens of
thousands of Jews settling in Palestine, as of the mid-1920s. (They are
shown in white on the first map, refuting those who mysteriously complained
that the maps alternated between showing sovereignty and showing
population). As late as the 1939 British White Paper, British officials
imagined that the Mandate would emerge as an independent Palestinian state
within 10 years.
In 1851, there had been 327,000 Palestinians (yes, the word 'Filistin' was
current then) and other non-Jews, and only 13,000 Jews. In 1925, after
decades of determined Jewish immigration, there were a little over 100,000
Jews, and there were 765,000 mostly Palestinian non-Jews in the British
Mandate of Palestine. For historical demography of this area, see Justin
McCarthy's painstaking
calculations(https://www.amazon.com/Population-Palestine-History-Statistics-
Institute/dp/0231071108/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268719415&sr=8-1) ;
it is not true, as sometimes is claimed, that we cannot know anything about
population figures in this region. See also his journal article, reprinted
at this
site(http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story559.h
tml) . The Palestinian population grew because of rapid population growth,
not in-migration, which was minor. The common allegation that Jerusalem had
a Jewish majority at some point in the 19th century is meaningless.
Jerusalem was a small town in 1851, and many pious or indigent elderly Jews
from Eastern Europe and elsewhere retired there because of charities that
would support them. In 1851, Jews were only about 4% of the population of
the territory that became the British Mandate of Palestine some 70 years
later. And, there had been few adherents of Judaism, just a few thousand,
from the time most Jews in Palestine adopted Christianity and Islam in the
first millennium CE all the way until the 20th century. In the British
Mandate of Palestine, the district of Jerusalem was largely Palestinian.
The rise of the Nazis in the 1930s impelled massive Jewish emigration to
Palestine, so by 1940 there were over 400,000 Jews there amid over a million
Palestinians.
The second map shows the United Nations partition plan of 1947, which
awarded Jews (who only then owned about 6% of Palestinian land) a
substantial state alongside a much reduced Palestine. Although apologists
for the Zionist movement say that the Zionists accepted this partition plan
and the Arabs rejected it, that is not entirely true. Zionist leader David
Ben Gurion noted in his diary when Israel was established that when the US
had been formed, no document set out its territorial extent, implying that
the same was true of Israel. We know that Ben Gurion was an Israeli
expansionist who fully intended to annex more land to Israel, and by 1956 he
attempted to add the Sinai and would have liked southern Lebanon. So the
Zionist "acceptance" of the UN partition plan did not mean very much beyond
a happiness that their initial starting point was much better than their
actual land ownership had given them any right to expect.
The third map shows the status quo after the Israeli-Palestinian civil war
of 1947-1948. It is not true that the entire Arab League attacked the Jewish
community in Palestine or later Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. As Avi
Shlaim has
shown(https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Wall-Israel-Arab-World/dp/0393321126/ref=s
r_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268720348&sr=8-3) , Jordan had made an
understanding with the Zionist leadership that it would grab the West Bank,
and its troops did not mount a campaign in the territory awarded to Israel
by the UN. Egypt grabbed Gaza and then tried to grab the Negev Desert, with
a few thousand badly trained and equipped troops, but was defeated by the
nascent Israeli army. Few other Arab states sent any significant number of
troops. The total number of troops on the Arab side actually on the ground
was about equal to those of the Zionist forces, and the Zionists had more
esprit de corps and better weaponry.
The final map shows the situation today, which springs from the Israeli
occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 and then the decision of the
Israelis to colonize the West Bank intensively (a process that is illegal in
the law of war concerning occupied populations).
There is nothing inaccurate about the maps at all, historically. Goldberg
maintained that the Palestinians' 'original sin' was rejecting the 1947 UN
partition plan. But since Ben Gurion and other expansionists went on to grab
more territory later in history, it is not clear that the Palestinians could
have avoided being occupied even if they had given away willingly so much of
their country in 1947. The first original sin was the contradictory and
feckless pledge by the British to sponsor Jewish immigration into their
Mandate in Palestine, which they wickedly and fantastically promised would
never inconvenience the Palestinians in any way. It was the same kind of
original sin as the French policy of sponsoring a million colons in French
Algeria, or the French attempt to create a Christian-dominated Lebanon where
the Christians would be privileged by French policy. The second original sin
was the refusal of the United States to allow Jews to immigrate in the 1930s
and early 1940s, which forced them to go to Palestine to escape the
monstrous, mass-murdering Nazis.
The map attracted so much ire and controversy not because it is inaccurate
but because it clearly shows what has been done to the Palestinians, which
the League of Nations had recognized as not far from achieving statehood in
its Covenant. Their statehood and their territory has been taken from them,
and they have been left stateless, without citizenship and therefore without
basic civil and human rights. The map makes it easy to see this process. The
map had to be stigmatized and made taboo. But even if that marginalization
of an image could be accomplished, the squalid reality of Palestinian
statelessness would remain, and the children of Gaza would still be being
malnourished by the deliberate Israeli policy of blockading civilians. The
map just points to a powerful reality; banishing the map does not change
that reality.
And here is the concluding document for this discussion:
I posted Tuesday on the legal
implications(http://www.juancole.com/2010/03/map-story-of-palestinian-nation
hood.html) of the League of Nations' recognition of Palestine as a "Class
A" Mandate, i.e. a former Ottoman territory nearly ready for national
independence, to which the mandatory authority (i.e. Britain) was to lend
'administrative assistance' in its attainment of independence. I received
some strange mail from fanatics afterward, insisting that the British
Mandate of Palestine was not recognized as a Class A Mandate. A scholar also
wrote me to point out that unlike the case with Iraq and Syria, the British
brought the Balfour Declaration into the Mandate document. The latter is
true, but not relevant to my point, since the League of Nations interpreted
the language of the declaration differently than did the Zionists. Others
complained that the map starts in the mid-1920s after the British had
already hived off Transjordan. But so what? If Class A Mandates were almost
ready for independence, why couldn't some portion of them be granted
independence first? The French also split the Mandate of Syria into two
parts, Syria and Lebanon. What has that got to do with anything?
The legal history does not bear out any of these objections to my argument.
The following British archival document makes it very clear that the British
were forced by France and Italy not to disregard the interests of the over
90% of their mandate that was Palestinian, and that London revised its
Mandate document under pressure as a result. The League of Nations created
and granted the Mandate, contrary to what Balfour kept sputtering (he was
not even in office 1922-1924). What the victorious Powers and the League of
Nations wanted has to be part of the interpretation of the Mandate's charge.
The League of Nations wanted the British Mandate of Palestine to serve the
Palestinians in accordance with their status as "Class A." It envisaged a
Palestinian state. Indeed, Sir Herbert Samuel, the first governor of the
British Mandate of Palestine, urged that the "future government of
Palestine" be required to repay any loans raised during the Mandate for its
development. So they envisaged a future government of Palestine, which they
assumed would be overwhelmingly Palestinian.
As for the language about a Jewish homeland, by that was not meant a
territorial state on Palestinian land. Curzon is clear that although the
Powers at the Versailles conferences after WW I recognized a Jewish
connection to Palestine and the Balfour Declaration, "this was far from
constituting anything in the nature of a legal claim . . ." He also reports
that the Powers said that "while Mr. Balfour's Declaration had provided for
the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, this was not the
same thing as the reconstitution of Palestine as a Jewish National Home-an
extension of the phrase for which there was no justification . . ."
So here is the Memorandum of Lord Curzon, British Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs, concerning League of Nations "Class A" Mandates in November
30, 1920. British National Archives, Catalogue Reference: CAB/24/115. Crown
copyright. (Note that I am not reproducing the entire document, leaving out
some discussion of arrangements in Iraq):
MANDATES A.
MEMORANDUM BY THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS. [Lord Curzon].
A FINAL decision about Mandates A is required. The Assembly of the League of
Nations is concerned about their submission to the Council, and will
probably not allow the gathering at Geneva to come to an end without a
decision being taken on the point.
It is understood that the Council of the League is likely to hold a meeting
while at Geneva to consider these Mandates, and it has been informed that
they will be submitted without further delay. The Mandates concerned are
those for Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine.
The French Mandate for Syria is drawn on the same lines as ours for
Mesopotamia, though not actually identical with it. There is nothing in it
to which we desire to object.
The Mandate for Mesopotamia has passed through several stages, tending in
each case to further simplification. It has been shown to, and approved by,
the French and Italian Governments, to whom we were under a pledge at San
Remo to submit it In its last printed form this Mandate was approved by the
Cabinet a few weeks ago . . .
As regards the Palestine Mandate, this Mandate also has passed through
several revises. When it was first shown to the French Government it at once
excited their vehement criticisms on the ground of its almost exclusively
Zionist complexion and of the manner in which the interests and rights of
the Arab majority (amounting to about nine-tenths of the population) were
ignored. The Italian Government expressed similar apprehensions. It was felt
that this would constitute a very serious, and possibly a fatal, objection
when the Mandate came ultimately before the Council of the League. The
Mandate, therefore, was largely rewritten, and finally received their
assent. It was also considered by an Inter-Departmental Conference here, in
which the Foreign Office, Board of Trade, War Office and India Office were
represented, and which passed the final draft.
In the course of these discussions strong objection was taken to a statement
which had been inserted in the Preamble of the first draft to the following
effect:- " Recognising the historical connection of the Jewish people with
Palestine and the claim which this gives them to reconstitute Palestine as
their National Home."
367 [4996]
It was pointed out (1) that, while the Powers had unquestionably recognised
the historical connection of the Jews with Palestine by their formal
acceptance of the Balfour Declaration and their textual incorporation of it
in the Turkish Peace Treaty drafted at San Remo, this was far from
constituting anything in the nature of a legal claim, and that the use of
such words might be, and was, indeed, certain to be, used as the basis of
all sorts of political claims by the Zionists for the control of Palestinian
administration in the future, and ;2) that, while Mr. Balfour's Declaration
had provided for the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine,
this was not the same thing as the reconstitution of Palestine as a Jewish
National Home-an extension of the phrase for which there was no
justification, and which was certain to be employed in the future as the
basis for claims of the character to which I have referred. On the other
hand, the Zionists pleaded for the insertion of some such phrase in the
preamble, on the ground that it would make all the difference to the money
that they aspired to raise in foreign, countries for the development of
Palestine. Mr. Balfour, who interested himself keenly in their case,
admitted, however, the force of the above contentions, and, on the eve of
leaving for Geneva, suggested an alternative form of words which I am
prepared to recommend.
Paragraph 3 of the Preamble would then conclude as follows (vide the words
italicised in the Draft-;
" and whereas recognition lias thereby (i.e., by the Treaty of Sevres) been
given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine, and
to the grounds for reconstituting their National Home in that country."
Simultaneously the Zionists pressed for the concession of preferential
rights for themselves in respect of public works, &c, in Article 11.
It was felt unanimously, and was agreed by Mr. Balfour, that there was no
ground for making this concession, which ought to be refused. . .
During the last few hours a telegram has been received from Sir H. Samuel,
urging that, in order to facilitate the raising of loans by the Palestine
Administration, which will otherwise be impossible, words should be added to
Article 27, providing that on the termination of the Mandate, the future
Government of Palestine shall fully honour the financial obligations
incurred by the Palestinian Administration during the period of the Mandate.
This appears to be a quite reasonable demand, and I have accordingly added
words (italicised at the end of Article 27) in order to meet it. With this
explanation, therefore, I hope that the Mandates in the form now submitted
may be formally passed and forwarded to the Council of the League.
C. OF K. November 30, 1920.
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