A century
ago, 67 words changed the course of history in the Middle East. In a
statement that could fit into two tweets, Arthur Balfour, then the
British Foreign Secretary, announced that the British government would
support establishing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
One hundred years later, the profound legacy of what became known as
the Balfour Declaration continues to define the dynamic between Israelis
and Palestinians. And though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
is in London this week commemorating the centennial with Theresa May,
it’s worth understanding why the Declaration is really nothing worth
celebrating.
Though he may be most known for aiding the Zionist cause in 1917,
it’s crucial to remember that Arthur Balfour was a white supremacist. He
made that much clear in his own words. In 1906, the British House of
Commons was engaged in a debate
about the native blacks in South Africa. Nearly all the members of
Parliament agreed that the disenfranchisement of the blacks was evil.
Not so Balfour, who – almost alone — argued against it.
“We have to face the facts,” Lord Balfour said. “Men are not born
equal, the white and black races are not born with equal capacities:
they are born with different capacities which education cannot and will
not change.”
But Balfour’s troubling views were not limited to Africa. In fact,
despite his now iconic support for Zionism, he was not exactly a friend
to the Jews. In the late 19th century, pogroms targeting Jews in the
Pale of Settlement had led to waves of Jewish flight westward, to
England and the United States. This influx of refugees led to an
increase in British anti-immigrant racism and outright anti-Semitism —
themes not unfamiliar to us today. Support for political action against
immigrants grew as the English public demanded immigration control to
keep certain immigrants, particularly Jews, out of the country.
The public found a sympathetic ear in Balfour. In 1905, while serving as Prime Minister, Balfour presided over
the passage of the Aliens Act. This legislation put the first
restrictions on immigration into Great Britain, and it was primarily
aimed at restricting Jewish immigration. According to historians,
Balfour had personally delivered passionate speeches about the
imperative to restrict the wave of Jews fleeing the Russian Empire from
entering Britain.
It may seem astonishing that Balfour, whose support of the Zionist
cause has made him a hero among Jews, would have implemented anti-Jewish
laws. But the truth is his support of Zionism stemmed from the exact
same source as his desire to limit Jewish immigration to Britain.
Both can be traced back to his white supremacist beliefs. Balfour
lived in an era of stirring nationalism, highly defined by
ethno-religious identity. Because of these sentiments, the early 20th
century was a time when ostensibly liberal Western nations struggled
with the challenge of incorporating Jewish citizens. What the Zionists
provided Balfour with was a solution to the challenges Jewish citizens
posed to his ethno-nationalist vision, a solution that didn’t force him
to reckon with them. Instead of insisting that societies accept all
citizens as equals, regardless of racial or religious background, the
Zionist movement offered a different answer: separation.
Balfour saw in Zionism not just a blessing for Jews, but for the West as well. As he wrote in 1919 in his Introduction to Nahum Sokolow’s History of Zionism,
the Zionist movement would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for
Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too
long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally
unable to expel or to absorb.”
By both giving Jews a place to go and a place to leave, Zionism
seemingly solved two problems at once, in Balfour’s mind. In other
words, his support of Zionism was motivated to an extent by his desire
to protect Britain from the negative effects, the “miseries,” of having
Jews in its midst. Rather than protecting the rights of one of its
minorities, Britain could simply export them, or at least, not import
any more.
Needless to say, this view of Zionism is steeped in the same kind of
white supremacy as Balfour’s view of South Africa’s blacks. But his
support of the Zionist dream had another problem. Rather than solving
the problem of how to handle a minority living in a white majority
country, the Balfour Declaration just shifted the same problem to a
different geography.
For the tension between ethno-nationalism and equality is equally
present today between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea, where
the Israeli state rules over the fate of millions of Palestinians who
either have no right to vote, are treated as second-class citizens or
are refugees denied repatriation. Today, it is Israel that views
Palestinians like myself as “demographic threats”, and sees “the
presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and
even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.”
That Balfour’s legacy of supremacy persists as much as British
support for Israel does is no accident. We have arrived at this point
today because the supremacist attitudes of Balfour informed policy,
lending imperial might to a project in pursuit of national
self-determination for Jews by trampling on the rights of native
non-Jews.
Remarkably, Balfour was unabashedly aware of the hypocrisy of his
stance. “The weak point of our position of course is that in the case of
Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle
of self-determination,” he wrote
in a letter to the British prime minister in 1919. “We do not propose
even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present
inhabitants of the country… the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that
ancient land.”
Those Arabs, of course, made up approximately 90 percent of the population. My grandparents were among them.
Therein lies the fundamental problem that continues through this day,
100 years later. Palestinians are denied the right to have rights
because from the outset, their views, their human rights and by
extension their very humanity, were consistently seen as inferior to
those of others. That was clear in Balfour’s perspective and the British
Mandate’s policy. And it persists in one form or another in many of the
policies of the state of Israel through this day.
Today as much as in 1917, the battle between ethno-nationalism and
equality, between particularism and universalism, has risen to the
foreground, from Donald Trump’s rise in America to Theresa May’s
Brexited Britain. Rather than resolving this tension, Balfour’s support
for Zionism merely exported it to Palestine.
Resisting the legacy of his racism will be the key to peace in Palestine/Israel and beyond.
Yousef Munayyer, a political analyst and writer, is Executive Director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
The views and opinions expressed in this
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