The answer to who should control Palestine was obvious

“I hate Mr. Balfour’s pronouncement. … To my mind it’s a wholly artificial scheme divorced from all relation to facts, and I wish it the ill success that it deserves.” — Gertrude Bell

 

One of the many entirely valid condemnations of the Balfour Declaration is that it directly conflicted with two earlier agreements the British made: The agreements made via the Hussein-McMahon correspondence and the Sykes-Picot agreement. But the Balfour Declaration was so unwarranted and so ill-conceived that it would have caused enormous historical damage even absent the conflict with the other two agreements.

At issue was the question of which group should control Palestine after World War I: Arabs, Zionists or some type of colonial/international authority. The answer couldn’t have been more obvious: The Arabs. They fought and died for their right to be the masters of their own fate. More than 5,000 Arabs lost their lives in the British war against the Ottomans. Fifteen thousand others were wounded. They did not fight and die to win the right to be dominated by colonial superpowers. They did not fight and die to create a Zionist state.

The Hussein-McMahon correspondence was between Hussein ibn Ali, sharif of Mecca and Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt. The correspondence consisted of 10 letters from July 1915 to March 1916. McMahon sought Arab support in their war against the Ottomans. Fight with us to overthrow the Ottomans, he proposed, and Britain will guarantee that Palestine and other Arab territories will have the right of self-rule. Hussein agreed to the bargain, but the British did not keep their word.

“Hussein agreed to the bargain, but the British did not keep their word.”

The Arab Revolt began on June 5, 1916. On Dec. 9, 1917, Gen. Allenby marched into Jerusalem. By 1918, the Ottomans were driven from the Middle East. This would not have been possible without Arab support.

Unlike the Balfour Declaration, there were no ambiguities in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence. Lord Curzon, Balfour’s successor, confirmed in 1918 that McMahon’s Oct. 24, 1915, letter to Hussein gave the assurance that Palestine should be Arab and independent. Further, in a note to the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the British Foreign Office stated: With regard to Palestine, “H.M.G. (His Majesty’s Government) are committed by Sir Henry McMahon’s letter to the Sherif on October 24, 1915, to its inclusion in the boundaries of Arab independence.”

How then, could there be any doubt — morally or diplomatically — as to who should control Palestine? What group could possibly make a stronger case for control of Palestine? No one did.

In Sykes-Picot, the French, in fact, made little claim to Palestinian territory per se. Their main concern was not to let Palestine fall into the hands of either the Zionists or the Arabs. In true duplicitous British fashion, the Sykes-Picot meetings were started just weeks after the promise made by McMahon. The French preferred international control of Palestine. They were as opposed to Zionism as they were to Pan-Arabism. The only land in Palestine that interested the French was a small section of Northern Galilee.

Of more importance to France was colonial control of parts of Southeastern Turkey, the Kurdistan region, Syria, Lebanon and parts of Iraq. This is what the French won under Sykes-Picot. It is clear that France would not at all have approved of the promises to the Arabs under the McMahon letters. It is even clearer that imperialist France had no right to insist on international control of Palestine.

Zionist claims

Then there are the Zionist claims to Palestine. They appear quite weak when juxtaposed with the Arab claims.

• The Hebrew God Yahweh intended for European Jews to live in Palestine.
• The time was right for the Western Imperialist powers to simply award a “homeland” in Palestine to the Zionists.
• This would, they argued, be an act not of colonization, but of repatriation, as the European Zionists claimed they were the genetic/cultural descendants of the Israelites who controlled much of Palestine about 3,000 years earlier.
• European Jews needed a place to escape persecution.

Zionists point with pride to the genocidal conquest of Canaan, as so vividly described in the book of Joshua and elsewhere in the Old Testament. They send the historically tone-deaf message that ancient massacres are a legitimate foundation for the formation of a modern state. A warm welcome back by the existing indigenous population was the last thing the Zionists should have expected. If Zionists were seeking safety, they never should have dreamed of finding it in Palestine. They say you can’t go home again, especially after 3,000 years.

Nor can ancient history be deemed more relevant than contemporary history. No one can take seriously the Zionist assertion that ancient Hebrews driving out ancient Canaanites is more relevant than contemporary Arabs driving out contemporary Ottomans. The Zionist claim to Palestine via divine right is, politely put, not plausible.

What happened next

Back on Earth, the fact is that no Zionists died liberating Palestine from the Ottomans. It was as if the Zionists were saying to the Arabs, “Thank you for driving out the Ottomans. We would now like to take control of Palestine.”

It was particularly galling to the Arabs to read in the Balfour Declaration that they were condescendingly referred to as “existing non-Jewish communities.” Those existing non-Jewish communities constituted 90% of the population of Palestine!

Beyond galling was the idea that after fighting and dying for their independence, these “existing non-Jewish communities” would be content to surrender their autonomy to European Zionists.

In the end, Britain reneged on the promises to both the French and the Arabs with respect to Palestine. There never was international control of Palestine after the war. Instead, it was governed under a British “mandate.” Much worse, the Arabs were never given the control of Palestine promised to them by McMahon.

Rather, Britain succumbed to various political machinations of the Zionists. Zionists debate who was more diplomatically manipulative: Chaim Weizmann or Nahum Sokolow. Zionists romantically write that the “poetic simplicity” of the Balfour Declaration resides in its presumption that a home for the Jews in their land needs no justification.

The consequences of the creation of a state without justification have been predictably tragic. Arab protests erupted throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The ethnic cleansing known as the Nakba resulted in the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians. This created a refugee crisis that continues to this day. Hatred and resentment inevitably followed the Zionists to their “Promised Land.” There never was a chance that Jews emigrating to Palestine would find there the safety they sought. Arab groups remain determined to fight the European Zionist colonizers, just as they fought the oppression of the Ottomans more than a century earlier.

 

David Haddad is a playwright who lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. His most recent work is Somebody Named Shaw . The play is a metaphor for the Zionist claim to Palestine based on the Balfour Declaration. It is patterned after A Streetcar Named Desire: “Blanche” shows up at “Stanley’s” home with a letter stating she was awarded ownership of Stanley’s home 50 years earlier. Stanley is not pleased. He taunts “Blanche” until she is driven to a final act of madness.