Levi9909 at Jews Sans Frontieres has published the following excerpt from Beatrice Webb’s diary in 1929, held at the London School of Economics. Webb, a socialist, denounces settler colonialism and goes on to decry the power of the Jewish lobby in London, the “vehement… case for the Jew,” based on a 2000 year old “return” of Russian Jews of who knows what ancestry– as compared to the case for the “poor and absent Arab.” This would have been after the riots of ’29, which were spurred by Zionist immigration, and the massacre of Jews in Hebron. (Thanks to Peter Belmont).
2 September 1929
Roused by the tragic happenings in Palestine there has buzzed around him [husband Sidney Webb who worked at the Colonial Office] Jews and the admirers of Jews, great and small in a state of violent grief and agitation demanding revenge and compensation. It is noteworthy that no representative of the Arabs – not even a casual admirer of the Arabs – has appeared on the scene. What one gathers from these excited persons is that the British officials on the spot, are held to be perniciously pro-Arab – not because they love the Arab but because, for one reason or another, they hate the Jew …- this may or may not be true-. Is there any principle relating to the rights of peoples to the territory in which they happen to live? I admire Jews and dislike Arabs. But the Zionist movement seems to me a gross violition [sic] of the right of the native to remain where he was born and his father and grandfather were born – if there is such a right. To talk about the return of the Jew to the land of his inheritance after an absence of 2000 years seems to me sheer nonsense and hypocritical nonsense. From whom were descended those Russian and Polish Jews? The principle which is really being asserted is the principle of selecting races for particular territories according to some peculiar needs or particular fitness. Or it may be some ideal of communal life to be realized by subsidised migration. But this process of artificially creating new communities of immigrants, brought from any parts of the world, is rather hard on the indigenous natives! The White Settlers in Kenya would seem to have as much right, on this assumption to be where they are, as the Russian Jews in Jerusalem! Yet exactly the same people – for instance Josiah Wedgwood – who denounce the White Settlers of Kenya as unwarranted intruders, are hotly in favour of the bran new [sic] Jewish colonies in Palestine…But the case for the Arab has not yet been heard; whilst the case for the Jew has been vehemently and powerfully pressed on the Government. The Zionist Movement and the mandate for a National Home for the Jews in Palestine seems to have originated in some such unequal pressure exercised by the wealthy and ubiquitous Jew on the one hand and the poor and absent Arab on the other.
This post has been updated to correct its earlier and completely-inaccurate confusion of Beatrix Potter and Beatrice Webb. All my fault. Thanks to commenters. Apologies to readers.
What strikes me about this 80+ year old sentiment is how true it remains today, and how Israel and its supporters still have no answer to its frank common sense.
To talk about the return of the Jew to the land of his inheritance after an absence of 2000 years seems to me sheer nonsense and hypocritical nonsense. From whom were descended those Russian and Polish Jews? The principle which is really being asserted is the principle of selecting races for particular territories according to some peculiar needs or particular fitness. Or it may be some ideal of communal life to be realized by subsidised migration. But this process of artificially creating new communities of immigrants, brought from any parts of the world, is rather hard on the indigenous natives!
What is even more remarkable is how many Zionists today not only cannot answer Webb, they have never even asked themselves these obvious questions. Sure, there are some who have sought to blame the indigenous people whose land was coveted and stolen — the Joan Peters thesis, the Mufti’s Nazi sympathies, etc. — but many others who truly think that Palestinian opposition to a Jewish State created on their land could only be explained by Jew hatred. The level of willful ignorance of what Webb clearly saw remains staggering.
Hmm…
I’m no expert, but aren’t you mixing Beatrice Webb with Beatrix Potter here?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Webb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrix_Potter
Phil, you’re mixing up Beatrice Webb with Beatrix Potter.
Let’s not let that distract us from Beatrice Webb’s observations about the London Zionist lobby. The 1929 Palestine uprising came after the Jewish population had tripled from 52,000 in 1919 to 156,000. The British Empire was faced abruptly with the consequences of the Balfour Declaration, adopted in desperation (and from intense Zionist persuasion) in 1917. There were various deliberations, the Shaw Commission, Hope-Simpson’s report, and a White Paper, and the British reversed their commitment to the Balfour Decl, decided to greatly reduce Jewish immigration. The London Zionist lobby went into overdrive, and the outcome was what the Arabs called the “Black Letter”, dictated by Weizmann to PM Ramsay MacDonald, reversing the reversal. No fairy tale, alas. See inter alia Susan Silsby Boyle, “The Betrayal of Palestine. The Story of George Antonius”, Walid Khalidi, ed., “From Haven to Conquest”
http://questionofpalestine.net
” confusion of Beatrix Potter and Beatrice Webb.”
lol.