• Historian Martin Kramer on his Facebook page corrects five myths about the Declaration. 
• Israel diplomat Mark Regev argues that anyone suggesting an apology for the Balfour Declaration must be an “extremist”, given what they are asking for. 
• Toby Greene offers some interesting thoughts about how the views of the two sides on the Balfour Declaration can be acknowledged. 
• Haaretz contributor Benjamin Pogrund reviews the circumstances of the Balfour Declaration and notes that it actually promised the Jews rights in both Jordan and Lebanon, as well.
• AIJAC’s Shmuel Levin notes that Israeli security forces have just discovered new terror tunnels into Israel from Gaza and discusses their significance. 
• Much is being written about the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Beersheba, led by the famous charge of the Australian light horsemen, with commemorations in Israel including the attendance of both Prime Minister Malcolm Tunbull and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten. While there is too much being written and broadcast on this significant event to link it all here, we recommend:
  • Speeches by PM  Turnbull and Israeli PM Netanyahu.
  • This video of the reenactment of the Charge of the Light Horsemen. 
  • This good summary of events and the political background by Andrew Tillet of the Australian Financial Review, including a brief quote from AIJAC’s Dr. Colin Rubenstein. 
  • This commemorative magazine put together by the Australian. 

Article1

The Balfour Declaration: Origins and Impact 

BICOM

1st November 2016

Key points:

• Zionism, the name given to the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, emerged in Europe at the end of 19th century and called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel / Palestine. By 1917, when the Balfour Declaration (the Declaration) was published, Zionism had cross-party support in Britain as well as government backing in France, America, and other countries, while the pending defeat of the Ottoman Empire – which had controlled that geographic area for the previous four hundred years – provided an opportunity for British politicians to translate their ideological support for Zionism into practice. In that period, the Zionist movement’s call for statehood was but one of many nationalist movements – such as the Arab, Turkish, Armenian, and Kurdish – which saw the collapse of empires as an opportunity to achieve self-determination.

• Britain’s role in the Middle East in the decades following the First World War was highly significant. But the history of the Declaration, the years of the British Mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel are complex and any assessment of Britain’s role needs to take that into consideration.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu standing with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson in the room in London’s Foreign Office where Arthur Balfour signed his famous 1917 declaration. February 6, 2017 (Facebook)

Introduction 

The Balfour Declaration was the British government’s pledge to help the Jewish community build a national home in Palestine and took the form of a letter penned on 2 November 1917 by British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour to Lord Rothschild, then serving as the honorary president of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. In it, Balfour wrote that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

• Controversy continues to surround the issue almost 100 years on, with supporters of Israel celebrating it and Palestinians viewing it as a criminal act. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) recently raised the idea of suing the British government, and a year-long campaign has been formally launched calling on Britain to atone for what is described as the “big crime Britain committed against the Palestinian people”. In July 2016, Palestinian Authority (PA) Minister Riyad al-Malki told Arab League leaders that the Declaration “gave people who don’t belong there [the Jews] something that wasn’t theirs”.

• Historians have offered numerous reasons to explain the issuance of the Declaration. These range from trying to secure British control over a strategically important area near the Suez Canal; preventing the German government from establishing its own relationship with the Zionist movement; the hope that the Zionist movement in Russia would persuade their government to remain on the Allies’s side in the First World War; Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s personal belief that the Jews could provide better governance than the Arab inhabitants, and his religious belief that facilitating a Jewish return to the Holy Land was following God’s plan; the diplomatic activity and skill of Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann; and the argument that wartime Britain and post-war Zionism shared identical interests and saw the Declaration as the “stepping stone” each needed to achieve their aims.

• Moving beyond the historical debate about motivations, this paper analyses the Declaration in its historical context, critically assessing its significance, and evaluating the extent to which it set the foundations for the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

The Ottoman Empire’s defeat and Allied support for Zionism

• The role of British as well as Australian and New Zealand (ANZAC) military forces in capturing Palestine from the Ottomans was a key factor as to why the British, rather than another country, publicly declared their support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. However the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was not solely a British policy but was also clearly supported by policy-makers from France, Italy, Russia and the US.

• France was the first of the Allied powers to recognise the Jews as a distinct nationality with French Foreign Minister Jules Cambon writing to Zionist leader Nahum Solokow in June 1917 that “it would be a deed of justice and of reparation to assist by the protection of the Allied Powers, in the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that Land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago”. In October 1917, US President Woodrow Wilson also expressed his support for Zionism, approving a draft text of the Declaration which he saw as a natural fit to his “New Diplomacy” that stressed national selfdetermination and democratic governance. In 1922 US Congress adopted a resolution declaring that a “national home for the Jewish people” be established in Palestine.

• Within Britain, it was the Labour Party that first publicly supported the Jewish return to Palestine. Three months prior to the Declaration, the Party’s new post war guidelines stated that “Palestine should be set free from the harsh and oppressive government of the Turk, in order that this country may form a Free State, under international guarantee, to which such of the Jewish people as desire to do so may return, and may work out their salvation free from interference by those of alien race or religion”. Moreover, on the eve of the San Remo Conference, the Labour Party neutralised attempts by left-wing groups within the Party to identify Zionism with British imperialism by giving its unqualified backing to Zionism. In a letter to Lloyd George, the Labour Party urged acceptance of the Mandate for Palestine “with a view of its being reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people”.

• The Ottoman Empire (of which Palestine was a part) entered and was subsequently defeated in the First World War, which allowed Britain to change its rhetorical sympathy for Zionism towards active support for it. At that time, the Zionist movement’s call for statehood was one of many nationalist movements – such as the Arab, Turkish, Armenian, and Kurdish – who saw the end of empires as an opportunity to achieve selfdetermination in their own homelands.

Palestine before and after the First World War

• The Declaration neither signalled the start of a Jewish return to the Land of Israel / Palestine nor mass immigration to it. Jews had enjoyed a continuous presence in the area for centuries before the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple in 70 CE and even after much of the population was expelled in the first and second century by the Romans, Jews remained in the land and achieved major cultural achievements, such as the compilation of the fourth-century Jerusalem Talmud, and the establishment of Tzfat (Safed) as a centre for Jewish mystical tradition in the 16th century.

• While the Land of Israel and a return to Zion had always maintained its centrality in Jewish ritual and liturgy, modern day political Zionism which called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland and independent Jewish life in the land of Israel emerged in Europe in the late 19th century, inspired by other nations’ struggles for independence and as a response to persecution. Driven by waves of pogroms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which killed over 60,000 Jews from 1881 to 1921, European Jews began immigrating to the area in significant numbers in the 1880s, with most settling in Jerusalem – which became a Jewish majority city – and smaller communities in Tzfat, Tiberias, Hebron and Jaffa. By 1914, 80,000-90,000 Jews – approximately 8-10 per cent of the total population – lived in Palestine without the assistance of any international state or sponsor. These Jewish immigrants were legal migrants in the same way that 120,000 Jews legally migrated from Eastern Europe to the UK between 1880-1914, and they lawfully and openly bought land – much of it barren wasteland uncultivated by local Arab farmers – from absentee land owners  (virtually all of the Jezreel Valley was purchased by Jews from only two people – the Turkish Sultan and a banker in Syria).

• Despite opposition among some locals to Jewish immigration, Zionism was not inherently antithetical to the Arab leadership, and some viewed it as helping their own quest for self-determination. The clearest evidence of Arab understanding for Zionism appears in the Weizmann-Faisal Agreement signed in London in 1919 on the eve of the Post-First World War Paris Peace Conference between Chaim Weizmann and Emir Faisal ibn Husain, the leader of the Arab delegation to the Conference. The Agreement’s preamble stated the “racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people” as well as the realisation that “the surest means of working out the consummation of their natural aspirations is through the closest possible collaboration in the development of the Arab State and Palestine”. Furthermore, the Agreement echoed the aims of the Declaration whereby each party committed all measure “to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale”. In a subsequent letter to Felix Frankfurter, President of the Zionist Organisation of America, Faisal wrote that: “The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement… We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist… Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other.”

The Declaration in international legal context

• The Declaration itself was not a legal document but the policy it expressed, the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, became binding in international law following the San Remo Conference, and the British Mandate from the League of Nations.

The 1920 San Remo Conference, which turned the Declaration into a legal commitment.

• The San Remo Conference, a meeting of the Allied Supreme Council following the First World War transformed the Declaration into a legal commitment. The Conference agreed to create a Mandatory power within Palestine that “should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. Naming the Jewish people as the cestui que trust to Palestine and basing the future administration of the country upon the fulfilment of the Declaration was a highly significant step towards future sovereignty and similar to the way in which the inhabitants of Iraq, Jordan and Syria received their sovereignty.

• In 1922, the Council of the League of Nations legally confirmed Britain as the Mandatory power for Palestine, and stated that “the Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home,” and that “an appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home”. The Council also provided “recognition…to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country”.

• International legal recognition of a Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine was reinforced following the end of the Second World War when the British government turned the question of the future of the country over to the UN, which subsequently established the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). The Committee recommended the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem under international control. On 29 November 1947, the UNGA voted in favour of Resolution 181, to approve the UNSCOP plan, by 33 votes to 13.

• While the Jewish Agency, representing the Jews of Palestine, accepted the plan, the Arab Higher Committee, the Palestinian Arabs’ political representatives, rejected it and Palestinian guerrilla forces began attacking Jewish communities. As the British Mandate formally ended on 14 May 1948 and David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel in line with UN resolution 181, the country was in a state of internecine violence and was was invaded by several neighbouring Arab countries. In March 1949, UN Security Council Resolution 69 voted 9 to 1 in favour of UN membership for Israel while in May, the UNGA Resolution 273 approved Israel’s application to the organisation by the requisite two-thirds majority.

British policy in Palestine – Did the Declaration make the creation of Israel inevitable?

• While the Declaration constituted an important component in building the legal basis for the establishment of the State of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people, it did not make such a homeland inevitable and subsequent actions by Britain – motivated by an attempt to balance competing commitments to Palestinian Jews and Arabs – actually threatened its viability.

• Balfour himself had interpreted the declaration as ultimately advancing Jewish sovereignty and statehood. In published minutes of a 31 October 1917 War cabinet meeting he wrote that although the Declaration did not entail a sovereign state immediately, his believed that a Jewish sovereign state “was a matter for gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution”.

•However, the Declaration was followed by a series of British White Papers that modified the spirit of the Declaration commitment, restricted Jewish immigration and put Jewish statehood under threat. In 1922 the government released the Churchill White Paper, which partitioned off three-quarters of the territory of Mandatory Palestine – located east of the Jordan River – in order to create the Emirate of Transjordan (later the Kingdom of Jordan) and imposed limitations on Jewish immigration of the remaining territory. The 1930 Passfield White Paper, published after Arab riots of 1929 and later withdrawn, also recommended limiting Jewish immigration Most damaging to the hopes of establishing a Jewish homeland came with the publication the 1939 White Paper on the eve of the Second World War, at a time when Jews in Europe were most dependent on Britain upholding its legal commitment to help facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine. The latter White Paper which, in its own words “concedes the Arab claim [for self-determination] by cancelling the Jewish claim” restricted Jewish immigration to 75,000 people over the next five years, thus abandoning one of the components in the Declaration and closing the borders of Palestine to hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution.

• It is perhaps ironic that at one time or another during the Mandate period, British policy succeeded in leaving both supporters of Zionism and Palestinian-Arab nationalism deeply disappointed and frustrated.

Article 2

Editorial: Celebrating Balfour

Jerusalem Post, 10/24/2017

Many either discount the Balfour Declaration as less than pivotal in the creation of Israel or view it as an example of the perfidy of British colonialism.

British Lord Arthur Balfour in Jerusalem in 1925. Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will leave for London at the beginning of November to take part in ceremonies that will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.

The events will, we hope, reflect the crucial importance of the Balfour Declaration as the first significant diplomatic success of the Zionist movement in its campaign to secure international recognition for the right of the Jewish people to a state in its historical homeland.

Unfortunately, many either discount the Balfour Declaration as less than pivotal in the creation of Israel or view it as an example of the perfidy of British colonialism and a standing injustice to the Palestinians which the British should apologize for, not celebrate.

Both positions are misguided. Although the document might seem to be nothing but a letter addressed by Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild for conveyance to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland, in reality it is much more.

As noted in an essay by historian Martin Kramer for the online magazine Mosaic, the Balfour Declaration was the product of the prodigious diplomatic activities of Nahum Sokolow and reflects nothing less than a joint statement backed in writing and in public statements by the US, France, Italy and the Vatican. 

As noted by Kramer, had the Balfour Declaration been nothing more than a secret letter to Zionist leaders that lacked the support of the Allied forces of World War I, it would never have entered the preamble of the British Mandate for Palestine created by the League of Nations in 1922; Britain would have completely disavowed it within a few years.

More pernicious, however, than the attempt to discount the Balfour Declaration’s importance or to claim that it was the product of a British government under the sway of Christian Restorationists (which has no basis in documented facts) is the ongoing attempt to discredit the declaration as a criminal act committed against the indigenous Palestinian people.

If 20th century history has taught us anything it is that the real “crime” committed by Britain was the postponing of the creation of the State of Israel. If Britain’s 1939 White Paper had not been issued as Nazi Germany prepared to articulate and implement its Final Solution, millions of Jews living in Europe at the time could have been saved. Six years later, when six million of them were dead, the British remained steadfast in their opposition to immigration.

And today, more than seven decades after the fact, when the full magnitude of the Shoah is well known, there are those who would have us believe that the Balfour Declaration is something to be ashamed of. For them apparently even the 600,000 Jews who made up the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine and thus were spared the fate of their fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters who remained behind were too many.

There are those who believe Britain should apologize for the Balfour Declaration, exactly because Britain helped facilitate the creation of a Jewish state in the Jewish people’s historic homeland.

Notably, under the leadership of Theresa May, Britain has made it clear that Balfour should be celebrated. In April, the official UK response to a petition signed by 13,600 people demanding an apology for Balfour, was that: “We are proud of our role in creating the State of Israel. Establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in the land to which they had such strong historical and religious ties was the right and moral thing to do, particularly against the background of centuries of persecution.”

As for claims by Palestinians that the Balfour Declaration was a betrayal of the Palestinian people, the true betrayal was the Palestinian political leadership’s rejection of a pragmatism that would have led to the creation of an Arab state alongside the Jewish state as stipulated in the 1947 UN resolution for the partition of Palestine. Instead, Palestine’s Arabs, backed by all the Arab nations of the region, chose the path of war – and lost.

Palestinians’ disastrous choices and leadership failures have left them stateless, not the Balfour Declaration.

The only tragedy of the Balfour Declaration is that it was not implemented earlier. This should be remembered in London next week.

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Article 3

Balfour, the Palestinians — and No Peace

Jonathan Tobin

Algemeiner, October 30, 2017

PA President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the UN General Assembly in September. Photo: UN.

JNS.org – It was a minor news story in the summer of 2016. Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas announced that he was suing Great Britain over the Balfour Declaration –  which was issued on November 2, 1917.

But as we prepare to observe the centennial of that document, it’s important to understand that although his lawsuit was a stunt, Abbas was serious. More than that, the symbolism of his protest tells us more about what is preventing peace between Israel and the Palestinians than any of the usual explanations about settlements, borders, the status of Jerusalem or criticisms of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As Elliot Jager, author of a new and timely book on the topic, The Balfour Declaration: 67 Words, 100 Years of Conflict, has written, Abbas’ decision to focus on Balfour wasn’t a joke.

Ten decades after British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour publicly expressed his government’s “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and its support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” the Palestinian Arabs are still unreconciled to the fact that this goal was realized with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. 

To Abbas and his Fatah party — as well as their Hamas rivals, Balfour is the original sin of the Middle East that explains all the suffering of their people in the last century. More than that, Balfour is, as Jager — a former Jerusalem Post editor and author — writes, the key to understanding why negotiations between Israel and the PA have remained stalemated in the more than two decades since the Oslo Accords.

“The 1993 Oslo Accords notwithstanding, the PLO covenant — with its denunciation of the Balfour Declaration — has never been legally amended, and for good reason. The problem Palestinian Arabs have with Israel is its existence — not ‘settlements,’ ‘occupied’ territory or the security barrier,” writes Jager.

“Abbas has consistently made the point that the Palestinians won’t recognize or accept Israel as a Jewish state. That would acknowledge the legitimacy of a Jewish national home and doing so would basically end the conflict.”

This means the conflict remains, as Jager notes, an “all or nothing (zero sum) clash.”

Jager’s book provides an easy-to-understand guide for general readers. The British decision was based, in part, on genuine sympathy for the aspirations of a homeless people whose ties to the land was part of the bible that the English loved — as well as Zionist diplomacy. But Balfour was also the product of a mistaken belief — fueled by antisemitic myths — that the Jews had the power to aid the Allied war effort at a moment when the outcome of World War I was in doubt.

In truth, the Jews had no such power. It was Balfour that allowed them back onto the stage of world history and, following the Allied victory that brought Palestine under British control, gave Jews the opportunity to begin building a state in their ancient homeland — and to rectify the injustices of the past two millennia.

Yet it is not so much the events of 1917 — as the events that followed — that we need to understand.

Subsequent British governments not only whittled down the size of the Jewish home, but also betrayed their promise by limiting the rights of the Jews there in order to appease the Arab and Muslim world. That led to a series of proposals for further dividing the land, but the Arabs refused every such offer, including the United Nations partition plan of 1947 that called for the creation of both a Jewish and an Arab state.

Sharing even part of the country was unthinkable. To the Arabs, the return of the Jews was an injustice — because it would mean that even a tiny sliver of the region they considered Muslim might be under the sovereignty of a dhimmi — a despised minority. That same spirit is why the Palestinians are still unreconciled to the consequences of Balfour’s promise. As Jager writes, “continued Arab rejection of the Balfour Declaration one hundred years on makes any compromise leading to a genuine conflict resolution impossible.”

Just as many Palestinians remain in denial about the impossibility of their dream of eventually eradicating Israel, it is just as important that they come to terms with the Jews’ 1917 diplomatic triumph and understand why the Jews also have a right to be there. Until that happens, they will remain doomed to live in a limbo in which they can neither reverse the verdict of history, nor find a way to live in peace alongside those who benefited from Balfour’s historic promise.

Jonathan S. Tobin is opinion editor of JNS.org and a contributing writer for National Review. 

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