The Balfour Declaration's Racism - and Why It Still Matters
Around the world, people on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict are marking with gusto the centenary of the Balfour Declaration,
the British government’s pledge on 2 November 1917 to support "the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."
A
decade ago, there was little interest in this document, which was
generally regarded as an old piece of diplomatic history, so very far
away from contemporary politics.
But
since the conflict on the ground has become locked in an impasse, the
war for legitimacy in global civil society has attained a new
significance. And so, the international history of that fight for
legitimacy is relevant again.
Unfortunately,
however, most of the current public war of words about the Balfour
Declaration tells us nothing new about its history or the conflict as a
whole; supporters of Israel celebrate, while pro-Palestinian voices
protest.
This
familiar ritual - the same today as it was in the 1920s - seldom
engages with perhaps the most important question: Why did the
Declaration create such a mess? A significant part of the answer is to
be found in the racism of the British government 100 years ago, which
disturbingly, continues to reverberate in the conflict to this day.
On 31 October 1917, when the British Cabinet agreed to publish the Declaration, the outcome of the First World War was on a knife-edge.
One
of the decisive developments of that year had been the decision in
April of the United States government to enter the war on the side of
the allies. Yet America’s military mobilization had been slow. At the
same time, one of Britain’s most important partners, the Russian empire,
had been struck by a revolution in March, and looked like it might bow
out of the war entirely.
Significant
figures in the British government, including Prime Minister David Lloyd
George and Foreign Secretary A.J. Balfour, thought that the world’s
Jews could help Britain to deal with these urgent problems.
The
British foreign policy elite, along with their counterparts on both
sides of the global war, believed that Jews possessed a tremendous power
around the world. No policymaker put down on paper how exactly this
influence was supposed to work - it was understood as a nebulous force
that could steer high finance, press, public opinion, and (!)
revolutionary socialism. Nonetheless, in the minds of the political
establishment, this power was very real and significant.
The
notion of Jewish power is, of course, an elemental feature of
anti-Semitism today, as it was in 1917. The idea was apparent already in
the time of Martin Luther, who argued in 1543 that the Jews wanted to
control the world (the coincidence of the anniversary of his 95 Theses
and the decision to issue the Declaration should give us all pause for
thought).
The
British government’s interest in the weapon of supposed Jewish power
far outweighed their concern with the future of Zionism in the Holy
Land.
They
did not engage in any wartime planning regarding the development of "a
national home for the Jewish people." In contrast, the government
invested significant resources in trying to convince world Jewry that
the Declaration was the realization of the Zionist dream - in short,
propaganda. Following the British military occupation of Jerusalem in
December 1917, their administration promoted this idea widely in
occupied Palestine.
Yet
the Cabinet had no intention of giving Judaea to the Jews; they wanted
the land for themselves - the key, as it was, to protecting the Suez
Canal and the Persian Gulf.
A set of racial assumptions about Jews contributed to this fateful step of exaggerating Britain’s enthusiasm for Zionism.
Most
British policymakers who backed the Balfour Declaration judged that the
majority of Zionists did not want, and would not want, an independent
Jewish state. According to the dominant political thinking at the time
in Britain, independent nationhood stood at the apex of human
development, which was possessed only by white Europeans. Such a state
of full sovereignty could not be held (or even expected) by lesser
peoples - a belief held by Middle East adviser Sir Mark Sykes in 1917,
as it had been by John Stuart Mill in 1861.
In
the racial thinking of early 20th century Europe, the Jews had not
reached this point of civilizational progress. Their fate was to be
governed. Therefore, the British could quite comfortably wax lyrical
about Balfour as the end of Jewish exile, without being concerned about
Jewish political ambitions to control the land themselves.
On
the Palestinian Arab side of the equation, the impact of racial thought
on the policies of the British government was just as pronounced.
Heavily
influenced by the stories of the Old Testament - the metatext of
British culture - the likes of Lloyd George saw the Holy Land as the
landscape of the Children of Israel. The Jews were, so the story went,
the authentic inhabitants (though not rulers) of the land. The Arabs of
Palestine, therefore, could not be a distinct people, rooted in that
soil.
British
Orientalists saw the Palestinian population, instead, as an impure mix
of different races, who were not 'authentic', 'racial' Arabs. This was
why the Declaration invoked the phrase "non-Jewish communities" to
describe the Arabs who constituted approximately 90% of the population.
With
this conception of Palestinian society, the British military
administration in the Holy Land was perfectly relaxed about promoting
the idea of Arab national liberation under the banner of Sharif Hussein
of Mecca, the leader of the revolt against the Ottomans. British Middle
East specialists assumed that Palestinian Arabs would not consider for a
moment that this independent future would include them.
How
wrong the British were. By the end of 1918, Arab political activists in
the Holy Land spoke of "Palestine for the Palestinians", and the first
Palestinian nationalist organizations were founded. In the Jewish world,
the majority of Zionists and their opponents now believed that a Jewish
state was imminent.
Such
was the power of the racial imagination that for at least two decades
the British government refused to acknowledge that most Zionists and
Palestinians were fighting for an independent state of their own.
Instead, British policymakers called statists "extremists", and labelled
those who accepted colonial sovereignty as "moderates".
In
2017, we need not look far to find powerful echoes of the racist ideas
of a century ago that led to the mess that followed the Balfour
Declaration.
The
chants of the marching fascists in Charlottesville made clear that
racist conspiracists’ foundational idea of global Jewish power is alive
and well, if anybody needed to be reminded. Indeed, the belief in the
notion of a ‘Jewish lobby’ is far from being the preserve of the
far-right; it’s mainstream.
In
the West, Jews and Palestinians who are in favour of complete
sovereignty over the land are quickly labelled extremists, as opposed to
just nationalists. And many opponents of the Palestinians in Israel and
abroad dispute that they constitute a nation, or that they are capable
of governing themselves in a fully sovereign state.
These
doubts about the ability of the Palestinians to administer a secure and
stable country go well beyond the Israeli right. Let us remember that
the Oslo peace accords, celebrated as the great hope for peace, did not
stipulate the creation of a Palestinian state.
Even
the international political consensus on how to remedy the conflict -
the two state solution - was the product of European race thinking; in
1937, the British Royal Commission for Palestine were the first to
advocate this solution on the basis that there existed an unbridgeable
racial gulf between Jews and Arabs.
Instead
of weaponizing the Balfour Declaration, global civil society would be
much better served by reflecting on the deeply problematic racial ideas
that were behind that act, and that are still with us today.
If
we could shed the vestiges of these ways of thinking about the
conflict, then maybe we will finally move beyond the arguments of the
1920s. For the time being, however, we are stuck in that very old
groove, as the broken record player continues to spin slowly without
pause.
James
Renton is Reader in History at Edge Hill University, and a Visiting
Fellow at the European University Institute. He is the author of The Zionist Masquerade: The Birth of the Anglo-Zionist Alliance, 1914-1918,
and has contributed to several programs made to commemorate the Balfour
centenary, including on BBC Radio 4 and Al Jazeera. Twitter: @RentonJE
Commenti
Posta un commento