Most histories I've read portray the Balfour Declaration of 11/2/1917 as a great act of charity or philosemitic vision. This piece in Le Monde Diplomatique, translated at the behest of Antony Loewenstein, portrays it as a gambit of power politics. I think the author, Alain Gresh, is leaving out the financial angle, the war bonds angle.
The Balfour Declaration meets several preoccupations of the government in London. While the War intensifies on the Continent, it is a matter of gaining the sympathy of global Jewry, perceived as being in the possession of considerable power. This vision, historically ironic, is not too distant from that of the worst anti-Semites who detect everywhere the ‘hand of the Jews’. The British Prime Minister [David Lloyd George] in his Memoirs evokes the power of ‘the Jewish race’, guided by its singular financial interests, whilst Lord Balfour himself had been the promoter, in 1905, of a project of a law on the limitation of immigration to Great Britain, aimed in particular at Russian Jewry. Mark Sykes, one of the negotiators of the accords that partition the Middle East in 1916, wrote to an Arab leader: “Believe me, for I am sincere when I tell you that this race [the Jews], vile and weak, is hegemonic through the entire world and that one is not able to defeat it. Jews sit in each government, in each bank, in each enterprise.” [‘vile’ appears to have been a favourite epithet which Sykes used indiscriminately – translator]
The Balfour Declaration is addressed particularly to American Jewry, suspected of sympathy for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to Russian Jewry, influenced by revolutionary organisations that have overturned the Tsar in the spring of 1917. Many of them are favourable to the idea that Russia signs a separate peace. London hopes to prevent this ‘desertion’. Balfour even evokes the mission that will be entrusted to the Jews in Palestine: to ensure that the Jews of the world behave ‘appropriately’. This calculation will fail since, during the night of the 6th November 1917, the insurgent Bolsheviks seize power at Petrograd and demand an immediate peace.
It’s no accident that the authors of the Balfour declaration would be opposed to Jewish immigration. The majority of Jewish leaders at the time opposed the Zionist project, suspecting that it was meant to create a mideastern dumping ground for Jews who might otherwise enter Western nations.
Bolshkevism was even back then primarily associated with Jews…
Sure many Jews were involved but does that make it a Jewish movement?
Are there other reasons that this relationship between Communism and Jews has been established in the popular perception of anti-semites?
Not exactly. However can’t one note that the movement’s leadership was very disproportionately Jewish? That is well documented. It’s the head that controls
the centipede’s many legs.
RE: Balfour Declaration
ALSO SEE: Sykes–Picot Agreement
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(excerpts) The Sykes-Picot(-Sazonov) Agreement[1] of 1916 was a secret agreement between the governments of the UK and France, with the assent of Imperial Russia, defining their respective spheres of influence and control in west Asia after the expected downfall of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. It was largely a trade agreement with a large area set aside for indirect control through an Arab state or a confederation of Arab states. The agreement was concluded on 16 May 1916.[2] It did not contemplate the assignment of any League of Nations mandates, since the League and its mandates were developed during the post-war period. The terms were negotiated by the French diplomat François Georges-Picot and Briton Sir Mark Sykes…
…Many of the relevant documents in the National Archives were later declassified and published. Among them were various assurances of Arab independence provided by Secretary of War, Lord Kitchener, the Viceroy of India, and others in the War Cabinet. The minutes of a Cabinet Eastern Committee meeting, chaired by Lord Curzon, held on 5 December 1918 to discuss the various Palestine undertakings makes it clear that Palestine had not been excluded from the agreement with Hussein. General Jan Smuts, Lord Balfour, Lord Robert Cecil, General Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and representatives of the Foreign Office, the India Office, the Admiralty, the Wax Office, and the Treasury were present. T. E. Lawrence also attended. According to the minutes Lord Curzon explained:
“The Palestine position is this. If we deal with our commitments, there is first the general pledge to Hussein in October 1915, under which Palestine was included in the areas as to which Great Britain pledged itself that they should be Arab and independent in the future . . . Great Britain and France – Italy subsequently agreeing – committed themselves to an international administration of Palestine in consultation with Russia, who was an ally at that time . . . A new feature was brought into the case in November 1917, when Mr Balfour, with the authority of the War Cabinet, issued his famous declaration to the Zionists that Palestine ‘should be the national home of the Jewish people, but that nothing should be done – and this, of course, was a most important proviso – to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. Those, as far as I know, are the only actual engagements into which we entered with regard to Palestine.”[17]…
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to en.wikipedia.org
This is consistent with Tom Segev’s analysis in One Palestine Complete.
There is little to this article as to what went on behind the scenes and why the Balfour Declaration was not only directed at American Jews but had been vetted for months before its signing by leading US Zionists, most prominently Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a close friend and advisor to President Wilson.
The declaration had nothing to do with charity and was not required for the British to gain a foothold in the Middle East since there was going to be a division of the region by France and Britain were they to win, in any case.
The declarationwas issued as payment for the US Zionists, notably Brandeis, having used their influence to get the US to join the war on the side of Britain at a time when Germany was winning the war and the British were close to being forced to sue for peace.
While Russia was allied with the Entente (England and France), world Jewry stood on the sidelines. Jews would not rally to its side because of the harsh treatment that Jews had received under the Czar. In the wake of the revolution and Russia withdrawing from the war, the way became open for Western Jews and the Zionists to openly side with Britain and France. What was left was to get the US into the war, despite Wilson’s pre-election promises and this, if we are to believe memoirs of an American Zionist who participated in the discussions about the letter and David Lloyd George’s expression of appreciation to the Zionists for assisting in British war aims afterward, that is exactly what they did.
Contrary to the notion that establishing a Jewish homeland was useful for Britain’s ambitions in the region, there is no evidence that its time there under the mandate was anything but a major headache.
In retrospect, had Germany won or, at least, not lost the war, there would have been no harsh, punitive conditions imposed upon it at Versailles. Consequently, the political and economic conditions would not have come about that produced Hitler and the National Socialist Party. Whether there would have been another world war a few decades later we will never know, but it is quite unlikely that it would have produced a holocaust of the Jews or anyone else.
So that may be one of the great ironies of history; that the political efforts of the Zionists to secure Palestine as a Jewish homeland became a key element in what eventually led to the destruction of European Jewry in WW 2.
This is not to blame the early Zionists for what happened to their co-religionists 20 years later; they could not have anticipated the rise of Hitler and they and their successors have enough on their charge sheets already. But it is something to think about.
I feel that I should apologise to le monde-diplo’s Gresh on behalf of my fellow Anglos.
On 2 N0vember Gresh posted (on the French LMD) a fragment on the Balfour declaration to memorialise the event on that day in 1917.
Unlike many other LMD pieces, this one was not translated and reproduced on sympathetic Anglo sites. Moreover, Gresh’s book, from which the fragment was extracted, in spite of its first edition being readily translated into half a dozen languages and a second edition having been issued, remains untranslated into English.
So I decided to translate the excerpt myself and had it put up on Antony Loewenstein’s blog.
But here Gresh is criticised for missing the point. The self-evident needs to be reinforced – we are referring to a 1200 word fragment. It is not an article. It appeared in English at my discretion, an irrelevant bystander. I felt compelled to translate the excerpt because, in terms of substance, it packed a lot in in what is little more than Op_Ed length; moreover, because the language (Gresh’s, not mine) is generally elegant.
The fragment is naturally incomplete, but it is not inaccurate.
The British aim was to win the war, but also to win the peace. We’re talking about the then dominant imperial power, and here is a monumentally crucial bit of real estate for the taking. But the Brits had to keep other powers from taking control of Palestine, especially the French. So the Brits find themselves (accidentally on purpose) in early 1917 ready to march into Palestine. Is this to be an act of liberation? Not on your nellie.
The Gresh excerpt is compatible with the position of the ‘non-orthodox’ reputable scholar Mayir Vereté (notably his classic 1970 Middle Eastern Studies article), a position also supported by the historian of colonialism, David Fieldhouse.