Nation-states as national homes; and Sir Edwin Montagu’s views on Zionism (1917)

Dilip Simeon

NB: This is part of a paper that I wrote in October 2023. Trump’s new declaration that he intends to complete the process of ethnic cleansing is merely the latest and most brazen declaration of the murderous impulses of American imperialism. He and his cronies will meet the same fate of the Presidents who sought to subjugate Vietnam, Chile, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan etc. DS

62,000 Palestinians have died (over 17,000 of them children). Many more lie buried under the rubble. 111,600 are wounded; a large part of them women and children. Missing and presumed dead: more than 14,222. (Source: Gaza War Live Tracker)

Unholy War

For many decades, the horrific crime of the Holocaust has been the spoken and unspoken backdrop for Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. But the prehistory of the issue goes back to the Great War of 1914-18. Foreseeing the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the British had sought to use Arab nationalism as a lever, and sent TE Lawrence to cultivate Arab cooperation. The Arab revolt against the Turks played a strategic role in the war, and was based on assurances given to Sharif Hussein of Mecca in May 1916, wherein the peoples subjugated by the Ottoman Empire of the Turks would gain national governments. These, coupled with Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points allayed Arab fears regarding Allied imperial intentions. Britain and France agreed via a secret protocol (Sykes-Picot Agreement) to divide Asiatic Turkey between themselves – this was made public by the Bolsheviks in 1917. A detailed account of Allied dealings with the Arabs in the Great War may be read in Chapter 1 of Fred J. Khouri’s book The Arab Israeli Dilemma (1985)

In the last phase of the war, Authur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, made a public statement announcing its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. This was the first use of the concept of ‘national home’, which became a norm during the Paris Peace conference of 1919. The unworkable ideal of ethnic/religious homogeneity which underlay this concept was to prove a disastrous and unstable foundation for the international order. But that is a different story.

The UN documentation on Palestine cites international legal scholars disputing the legal status of the Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917) under which a strategically motivated assurance was given by the British government to the Zionist Federation during the first world war. After the war the League of Nations was established by the victorious States to establish their concept of order. The colonial territories of the defeated States were placed under a Mandate system: a form of thinly disguised colonial tutelage. The Balfour assurance was included in the mandate for Palestine, formally allotted in 1922 to Great Britain by the League of Nations, without having ascertained the wishes of the Palestinian people, as required by the Covenant. ‘The Declaration was legally impotent. For Great Britain had no sovereign rights over Palestine… no authority to dispose of the land. The Declaration was merely a statement of British intentions…’. (References to Balfour and the Mandate are sourced from the United Nations document Origins and evolution of the Palestine problem)

Sir Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India and the only Jewish member of the British Cabinet, objected to these policy statements on the ground that Judaism was a universal faith, distinct from nationality, and that in the era of the modern nation-State the Jewish people did not constitute a nation. He questioned the credentials of the Zionist Organization to speak for all Jews. In secret memoranda (later made public) he wrote:

“Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom… it seems to be inconceivable that zionism should be officially recognized by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the ‘national home of the Jewish people’… I assume that it means that Mohammedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews, and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mohammedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine … When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country … I deny that Palestine is today associated with the Jews or properly to be regarded as a fit place for them to live in… It is quite true that Palestine plays a large part in Jewish history, but so it does in modern Mohammedan history, and, after the time of the Jews, surely it plays a larger part than any other country in Christian history … When the Jew has a national home, surely it follows that the impetus to deprive us of the rights of British citizenship must be enormously increased. Palestine will become the world’s ghetto.”

The second world war and the Shoah made Israel possible; but few of the great powers kept in mind the plight of Palestinians who were already living in the area. The Holocaust also took the lives of hundreds of thousands of the Romani and Sinti peoples, although this does not bear mention amongst Western commentators. In fact, a disregard of the local inhabitants is a characteristically colonial attitude that boils down to outright racism. I think Zionism was not a good idea, because as a historian I believe nation-states with homogenous populations are crucibles of intolerant ideologies and ethnic cleansing. It is significant that thoughtful Israelis have called for the repeal of the recently passed nation-state law for being exclusionary.

UNSCOP and the UN debate 1947-48

During the 25 years of the Palestine Mandate, from 1922 to 1947, large-scale Jewish immigration mainly from Eastern Europe took place, the numbers swelling in the 1930s with the notorious Nazi persecution of Jewry. Over this period the Jewish population increased from under 10 per cent in 1917 to over 30 per cent in 1947. Palestinian demands for independence and resistance to Jewish immigration led to the growth of anti-Jewish sentiment in the Arab world, and a rebellion in 1937, followed by continuing terrorism and violence from both sides during and after the Second World War. Great Britain, as the Mandatory Power, tried to implement formulae such as a partition scheme, provincial autonomy, and a unified independent Palestine. All were considered and abandoned, and in 1947, Great Britain in frustration turned the problem over to the United Nations.

The future of Palestine was the first major issue faced by the newly formed UNO. The UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was set up May 1947.

UNSCOP’s deliberations are crucial to an understanding of the issues at stake, and show that the rights of the existing inhabitants were persistently disregarded by the imperial powers which dominated the UNO. The Jewish Agency stated that notwithstanding emigration to countries other than Palestine, it would be unjust to deny the right to go to the Jewish national home to those who wanted to do so. ‘The Jewish problem in general was none other than the age-old question of Jewish homelessness, for which there was but one solution – that provided for by the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate; – the reconstitution of the Jewish national home in Palestine.” It was clear that Balfour and the Mandate were crucial to Zionist nationalism.

A European delegate pointed out that the future status of Palestine; and the question of the homeless Jews in Europe were two separate issues, and the only effect of linking them together would be “to render more difficult the solution of each. It is evident that the appalling tragedy of the homeless Jews in Europe makes it much more urgent to find a solution to the question of Palestine, as long as Palestine is considered to be the only place where Jewish refugees can find a home.”

The Arab case was that the putative Jewish State was linked to immigration and foreign subsidies. A Jewish State might decide upon immigration without limits and be granted foreign financial support. It would then become extremely populated, not reliant upon its own economy, and transform itself from a State where Jews could be safe into a bridgehead against the Arab world (emphasis added). This is what they wished to avoid. The destiny of Palestine had to be decided by its own people; and Zionism had no rightful claim, having relied on the support of an imperial régime acting arbitrarily and unjustly.

The Syrian delegate said there was no connection between the problems of displaced persons and European refugees with the question of Palestine. The resettlement of displaced persons should not be undertaken in any Non-Self-Governing Territory without the consent of the local population, and not be contemplated in any place where friendly relations between States would thereby be disturbed. The organization for the care of refugees was functional and the issue was beyond the purview on UNSCOP. The question of Palestine was altogether separate from the question of persecuted persons of Europe. The Arabs of Palestine were not responsible for the persecution of the Jews in Europe, and the Arabs were among those who sympathize with the persecuted Jews. However, the solution of that problem cannot be said to be a responsibility of Palestine, which is a tiny country and which had taken enough of those refugees and other people since 1920. Many other countries had better means of taking in these refugees.

The Palestinian case was that although the first duty of the United Nations was to prevent aggression, Palestine had suffered from that injustice for 30 years. Britain had held Palestine by armed force and had compelled the inhabitants to submit to Jewish immigration on a scale which threatened ultimately to convert the Palestinian Arabs into a political minority. In 1918 the population in Palestine had been 93 per cent Arab and 7 per cent Jewish, by 1948 ‘the insidious form of aggression … had raised the Jewish population to 33 per cent.’ Arguments had been cited that the persecution of European Jews gave them claim to unlimited immigration into Palestine; that the Jews themselves were unwilling to be absorbed into any other country. “One asked whether the desire of persecuted Jewry was to be the deciding factor in the situation, and whether the immigration laws of various States should give way to the desire of the displaced persons to enter particular countries or areas. It was questionable whether any other country would be prepared to permit unrestricted immigration for such reasons: the unwillingness of a minority in any country to continue to occupy that position was not a valid reason for converting a minority into a majority and a majority into a minority.”

In examining the majority solution (for partition) it would be found that in more than half the area of the country the Arabs were to be converted into a minority, in order that the Jewish population might become a politically dominant Jewish State. In a letter published in the New York times on 28 September 1947, Dr. Magnes, President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem criticized the majority plan, saying that partition would not stop the terrorist activities of Jewish groups, which having secured partition through terror, would attempt to secure the rest of the country for the Jews in the same way.

Hannah Arendt: The Jewish Writings, p 394: ‘With the support of a Jewish state by the great powers, the non-Zionists believed themselves refuted by reality itself. Their sudden loss of significance, and their helplessness in the face of what they felt justified in thinking an accomplished fact, were the results of an attitude that has always identified reality with the sum of those facts created by the powers that be-and by them only. They had believed in the Balfour Declaration rather than in the wish of the Jewish people to build its homeland; they had reckoned with the British or American governments rather than with the people living in the Near East. They had refused to go along with the Biltmore Program-but they accepted it once it was recognized by the United States and the United Nations.

Now, if the non-Zionists had wanted to act as genuine realists in Jewish politics, they should have insisted and continued to insist that the only permanent reality in the whole constellation was the presence of Arabs in Palestine, a reality no decision could alter-except perhaps the decision of a totalitarian state, implemented by its particular brand of ruthless force. Instead, they mistook decisions of great powers for the ultimate realities and lacked the courage to warn, not only their fellow Jews, but also their respective governments of the possible consequences of partition and the declaration of a Jewish state. It was ominous enough that no significant Zionist party was left to oppose the decision of November 29, the minority being committed to the Jewish state, and the others (the majority under Weizmann) to partition; but it was downright tragic that at this most crucial of all moments the loyal opposition of the non-Zionists simply disappeared’ Arendt Hannah, The Jewish Writings, Schocken Books, New York; 2007

Forced exodus

On November 29, 1947 the GA passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in the land traditionally claimed at the Jewish homeland from Biblical sources. It also adopted the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine – which planned to divide the territory into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a Special International Regime for Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The partition plan was supported by the USA and the Soviet bloc, and opposed by Arab nations, India and Pakistan. Britain and France abstained. Khouri opines that had the Arabs been more amenable to solutions in UNSCOP they might have obtained a compromise; and had the Zionists paid more attention to Arab national aspirations and been amenable to accepting less than their full program, they would have created conditions for co-existence with little or no bitterness and implacable hostility in the Arab world. As things stood, they placed more importance on the support of foreign powers than on the friendship of their neighbors. (Khoury, pp 67-68). Few took into account the harmful impact of an enforced partition would have on inter-community relations in the Middle East, where over a million Arabs of Jewish faith resided. Thus began a tragic confrontation which continues to unfold

A civil war began, which saw active Zionist militia who the British declared to be terrorists. The British Mandate ended on May 14, 1948; and Israel declared independence on May 15. The civil war now became generalised, with forces from Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq entering Palestine. All semblance of governance in Palestine collapsed. After ten months, Israel controlled the territory allocated to the putative Jewish state along with nearly 60 % of the land allocated to Arab Palestine.

On April 9 1948 combined Etzel and Stern Gang units mounted a deliberate and unprovoked attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin on the western edge of Jerusalem. 254 persons including women and children were reported killed. The idea was to push out the entire Arab population by military or psychological means. The terror that resulted led to a mass exodus of refugees into neighbouring countries, estimated to number 726,000 by the end of 1949 – half the indigenous population of Palestine. Charges that their flight had been incited by Arab leaders were refuted by United Nations reports. On 29 November 1947, a partition plan was finally voted upon. It received 33 votes in favour and 13 against with 10 abstentions, India voted against. The details took months of negotiations, but a compromise plan drafted by Count Folke Bernadotte of UNSCOP was never discussed after his murder by the Stern Gang in September 1948.

After 1948

In 1956 Israel, France and the UK launched a war on Egypt, after Nasser nationalised the Suz canal and recognised the People’s Republic of China. Despite heavy losses, Nasser sabotaged the scheme by sinking cargo ships filled with rocks at the mouth of the canal. President Eisenhower forced the allies to give up the project – this was the British Empire’s last hurrah – it ended with a whimper. Subsequently the 1967 war led to the capture of the West Bank from Jordan and Sinai from Egypt. The Camp David accords of September 1978 were political agreements signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on 17 September 1978 following secret negotiations sponsored by Jimmy Carter. The first part led to the return of Sinai to Egypt and an Egypt-Israel peace treaty in 1979. The second part addressed Palestinian statehood and the future of the West Bank, and was rejected by the UN General Assembly because the agreement was concluded without participation of the UN and the PLO and did not comply with the Palestinian right of return, self-determination and to national independence and sovereignty. The West Bank remained under Israeli military government till 1988. Subsequent ‘autonomy talks’ between representatives of Egypt, Israel, and the US from 1979 to 1982, were premised on a non-sovereign resolution to Palestinian national aspirations.

Soon after the first part of the Middle East Accords of 1993-5, brokered by Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin’s stated: “We do not accept the Palestinian goal of an independent Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan. We believe there is a separate Palestinian entity short of a state.” This despite the fact that in 1988, the PLO officially recognized Israel and accepted its right to exist in peace and security. These concessions, coupled with the PLO’s support for Saddam Hussein in the first Iraq war (2003), weakened the organisation politically.

In July 2000, during Bill Clinton’s second term, Prime Minister Ehud Baak and Chairman Yasser Arafat accepted an agreement that left only 22 % of historic Palestine to the Palestinian Authority. And the West Bank was to be divided into zones or cantons, which many observers compared to the South African Bantustans. This was a slap in the face of Palestinian aspirations, but the two sides kept talking till 2001; and were close to an agreement. At that point Barak was defeated by Ariel Sharon, who did not want a Palestinian state and did not restart the talks. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that the Clinton parameters “are not binding on the new government to be formed in Israel”.

The Saudi sponsored Arab Peace Initiative of March 2002 called for a settlement along the standard lines of an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories with ‘a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem’ was promoted by the entire Arab world, but ignored by Sharon’s government. In between these developments there took place two civilian uprisings by Palestinians frustrated by endless occupation: the first between 1987 and 1993; and the second, between 2000 and 2005. Hamas, which was founded in 1987 due to increasing disillusionment with the PLO, had an openly Islamist and antisemitic programme till 2017, when it declared itself anti-Zionist, not anti-Jewish; and prepared to accept a two-state solution with the 1967 borders. Benjamin Netanyahu, who succeeded Ehud Olmert in 2008, followed a policy of aiding Hamas with the objective of weakening the PA and dividing Palestinian nationalism.

An increasing segment of Israeli opinion believes him to have followed a path of extremist provocation and to be primarily responsible for the latest outbreak. There’s ample evidence that Hamas’ extremism was considered an asset by an extremist Israeli leadership.

The embrace of evil

In one of the earliest articles I wrote on Palestine in 2009, I stressed the need for non-violent resistance; and the continuing relevance of Mahatma Gandhi’s life and methods. Violence destroys the conscience and renders us captive to the reptilian mind within. To attack members of any, repeat any, community or ethnicity for the mere fact that they have a particular faith or identity is abhorrent and also stupid, because it assumes that every member of xyz community thinks, and is bound to think, the same way.

In a number of statements made between 1921 and 1948, Mahatma Gandhi made clear his serious doubts about the Balfour Declaration, since Palestine was not a stake in the Great War. He was also emphatic about his sympathy with the worlds Jews – some of whom he said, were his lifelong companions. He called antisemitism ‘a remnant of barbarism’, Jews ‘the untouchables of Christianity’, and said that ‘the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history.’ In some of the most significant statements, he said: ‘The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French. If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled?’ (Collected Works, vol 68, p 137 -141)

What is alarming and an eye-opener is that vast sections of public opinion think in a communal way, they refer to entire populations as characterised by good or evil qualities, bearers of guilt or innocence over centuries and generations, automatically to be defended or condemned. We are in the midst of a near total abandonment of thought. In the words of another Holocaust survivor, Heda Margolius Kovály, ‘It seemed to us that we were witnessing a total break in the evolution of mankind, the complete collapse of man as a rational being’. (Under a cruel star: a life in Prague, 1941-1968; p 39)

Violence has taken over in Israel and Palestine. It is spreading all over the world. Innocent people are being targeted for no reason except their faith. It is brutality that has become the central issue, not the political issues that should be the crux. Sections of Israeli society are also exhibiting forms of depravity. It is horrifying that 62,000 Palestinians have died (over 17,000 of them children). Who knows how many more lie buried under the rubble). 111,600 are wounded; a large part of them women and children. (Source: Gaza War Live Tracker) It is cruel for an IDF spokesman to claim that two dead civilians for every dead Hamas fighter is something ‘tremendously positive’. It is this suppression of human conscience that lay behind Gandhi’s insistence that non-violence was the only way out of the terrible political conflicts of our time.

I will remind all those who empathise with Zionism and Israel, that the sight of corpses of Palestinian babies rotting in their cots in Gaza is no less a manifestation of evil before God and humanity. The spiral of violence destroys our sense of chronological sequence; and even renders obscene the question of who started it. Because the effort to obliterate Palestinians physically and politically dates back (at least) to 1948, when three-quarters of a million of them were pushed out of their homes and villages by numerous acts of terror, and the murder of UNSCOP’s Count Bernadotte. Arch-imperialist Lord Curzon, Britain’s Foreign Secretary in 1923, warned that the driving out of peoples (with regard to Greece and Turkey) was ‘a thoroughly bad and vicious solution, for which the world will pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come’ (refer R. M. Douglas; p 71).

How right he was.

Nor, when speaking of brutalities committed by Hamas, should we forget the Sabra-Shatila massacre of 1982, enabled by the IDF and Defence Minister Ariel Sharon. In his book Preventing Palestine (2018), Professor Seth Anziska revealed the extent of American and Israeli complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. These revelations were based on archival research in Israel. On Nov 9, 2023, Anziska also wrote about the lessons of the 1983 war: “By disavowing the moral consequences of state power and sovereignty, Israel’s leaders and many within Israeli society – as well as staunch supporters abroad – refuse to admit that they can be both victims and perpetrators.” Then there was the Hebron mosque massacre of worshippers in 1994; and the brutal behaviour of settlers on the West Bank, who have redoubled their efforts to ‘cleanse’ this area of Palestinians. Nor can we forget the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Zionist fanatic in 1995. Or that Netanyahu actually propped up Hamas for years, in order to divide Palestinians; in the face of which it is difficult to take seriously American talk of entrusting Gaza to the Palestinian Authority.

All these acts are a huge burden of monstrosity, and they need to be kept in mind by all commentators and op-ed writers, who tend to forget that antisemitism is historically a Christian form of bigotry, emanating from the Gospel according to Matthew; according to which Jews owned the responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus. Also to be recalled is that Arabs are a semitic people; and that all three Abrahamic faiths are semitic. Here’s an informed comment about a supposedly antisemitic slogan: It’s Time to Confront Israel’s Version of “From the River to the Sea”

Terrible things have happened at the hands of the ‘Free World’ (I’m aware of what communists in power have done); stretching from Vietnam to Iran to Chile to Iraq to Afghanistan; resulting in millions of lives lost. Napalm and atom bombs and depleted uranium; all this, all in the name of freedom and democracy. Terrible things have happened in South Asia, millions displaced in 1947-48; a series of assassinations and pogroms; the Pakistan Army’s attacks on East Bengalis in 1971; prolonged civil war in Sri Lanka, violent attacks on Indians by other Indians in 1984, 2002, 2023 (Manipur); all these events were no less horrific than the crimes of Hamas. How quickly they are forgotten by our rulers and op-ed writers..

Establishments take note of such things or fail to do so, depending on political convenience. But we ordinary people have to notice everything, merely in order to preserve our sanity. As significant a figure as a former Mossad chief has spoken of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians as a version of apartheid. A thoughtful man indeed, I only wish there were more like him. I say this in complete agreement with the retired senior American officer whom Freedland cites: “The most important terrain on the planet is the six inches between the ears.” There have been six Arab-Israeli wars since 1948; and numerous uprisings by the subject population. Why has the UNO been unable to make amends for its most disastrous blunder?

What is transpiring now is yet another example of the dehumanisation of non-European peoples by Western establishments (with honourable exceptions). They stand forth before the world as shameless racists. Millions of Europeans can see what is happening, and are demonstrating for a cease fire. I salute them, as also those brave Israelis who are opposing the actions of their government. Freedland suggests humanitarian relief by the IDF could be a ‘signal to Palestinians that Israel’s fight is not with them as a people but with Hamas alone.’ Liberal western commentators talk about ‘the day after’, and ‘de-radicalising Gaza,’ and a Marshal Plan for the Middle East. With over twenty thousand dead Palestinians, most of them women and children, with refugee camps, hospitals and religious places attacked, how do these worthy people think such schemes are possible?

Can they even acknowledge that Israel’s fight with the Palestinian people began 75 years ago? That the entire Western plan for Palestine has always been to prevent a sovereign state from coming into existence? Is it reasonable to think that hundreds of thousands of survivors of this carnage and their relatives will be amicably inclined towards Biden, Netanyahu and the establishments they represent?

I am sad to say the repercussions of this slaughter will last this century and beyond. It will not lead to any good end. Final solutions never do. And they are never final.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

All That’s Left of You review – deeply moving epic of Palestinian intergenerational trauma

Patrick Lawrence: Authorized Atrocities / Late-Imperial Duplicities

Gaza and the End of Western Fantasy

Thanks to Gaza, European philosophy has been exposed as ethically bankrupt

Trump’s Gaza proposal rejected by allies and condemned as ethnic cleansing plan

A Massive Database of Evidence, compiled by a Historian, Documents Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza

Reading the Bible with the eyes of the Canaanites: Neo-Zionism, political theology and the Land Traditions of the Bible (1967 to Gaza 2009)

The Battle for the Soul of Judaism: Tribalism, Amalek and Axial Age Universalism of Isaiah

Rashid Khalidi: ‘Israel Has Created a Nightmare Scenario for Itself. The Clock Is Ticking’

Albert Einstein on Jews in Palestine (1932-49)

Michael Brenner: The West’s Reckoning?