Gideon Levy : Balfour’s original sin *** haaretz.com
There
was never anything like it: an empire promising a land that it had not
yet conquered to a people not living there, without asking the
inhabitants. There’s no other way to describe the unbelievable
colonialist temerity that cries out from every letter in the Balfour Declaration, now marking its centenary.
The
prime ministers of Israel and Britain will celebrate a huge Zionist
achievement this week. Now the time has come for some soul-searching as
well. The celebration is over. One hundred years of colonialism, first
British and then, inspired by it, Israeli, has come at the expense of
another people, and that is its endless disaster.
The
Balfour Declaration could have been a just document if it had pledged
equal treatment of both the people who dreamed of the land and the
people dwelling there. But Britain preferred the dreamers, hardly any of
whom lived in the country, over its inhabitants who had lived there for
hundreds of years and were its absolute majority, and preferred to give
them no national rights.
Imagine
a power promising to turn Israel into the national home of the Israeli
Arabs and calling for the Jewish majority to suffice with “civil and
religious rights.” That’s what happened then, but in an even more
discriminatory way: The Jews were an even smaller minority (less than a
tenth) than Israeli Arabs are today.
Thus
Britain sowed the seeds of the calamity whose poisonous fruits both
peoples are eating to this day. This isn’t a cause for celebration;
rather, on the 100th anniversary of the declaration, it's a call for
repairing the injustice that was never even recognized, not by Britain
and of course not by Israel.
Not
only was the State of Israel born as a result of the declaration, so
was the policy toward “the non-Jewish communities” as stated in the
letter by Lord Arthur James Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild.
The discrimination against the Arabs of Israel and the occupation of the
Palestinians are the direct continuation of the letter. British
colonialism prepared the way for Israeli colonialism, even if it didn’t
intend for it to continue for a 100 years and more.
Israel
2017 also pledges to grant “civil and religious rights” to the
Palestinians. But they don’t have a national home. Balfour was the first
to promise it.
Sure,
Britain spread these promises around in those years, the years of World
War I, contradictory promises including to the Arabs, but it fulfilled
them only to the Jews. As Shlomo Avineri wrote in Haaretz’s Hebrew
edition on Friday regarding the context and implications of the Balfour
Declaration, its main purpose was to minimize American-Jewish opposition
to U.S. participation in the war.
Whatever
the motive was, following the Balfour Declaration, more Jews immigrated
to this country. Immediately on their arrival they acted like
overlords, and they haven’t changed their attitude toward the non-Jewish
inhabitants to this day. Balfour let them do this. Not by chance did a
small group of Sephardi Jews living in Palestine oppose Balfour and seek
equality with the Arabs, as Ofer Aderet wrote in Haaretz on Friday. And not by chance were they silenced.
Balfour
let the Jewish minority take over the country, callously ignoring the
national rights of another people that had lived in the land for
generations. Exactly 50 years after the Balfour Declaration, Israel
conquered the West Bank and Gaza. It invaded them with the same
colonialist feet and it continues its occupation and its ignoring of the
rights of the inhabitants.
If
Balfour were alive today, he would feel comfortable in the Habayit
Hayehudi party. Like MK Bezalel Smotrich, Balfour also thought the Jews
have rights in this country and the Palestinians don’t and never will.
Like his successors on the Israeli right, Balfour never concealed this.
In his speech to the British Parliament in 1922, he came right out and
said it.
On
the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the nationalist right
should bow its head in thanksgiving to the person who originated Jewish
superiority in this country, Lord Balfour. Palestinians and the Jews
who seek justice should mourn. If he hadn’t formulated his declaration
the way he did, maybe this country would be different and more just.
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