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evan jones

retired Australian academic

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  • 'Le Monde' is revisionist on Balfour Declaration
    • evan jones November 15, 2009 at 11:09 pm

      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.

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