Palestinians One Hundred Year Struggle to Repudiate the Balfour Agreement
Renee Parsons
There is little recognition that the Balfour Declaration was one of the British Empire’s most colossal political and foreign policy blunders that continues to reverberate today into the most catastrophic moral conflict of modern times.
It is generally regarded that the Balfour Declaration was a simplistic one page letter authored by UK Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild and that letter opened the way for Zionist encroachment on the historic and biblical homeland of the indigenous Palestinian people. Prior to WW I, the narrow strip of Palestine was populated by 90% Muslims, 8% Sephardic Jews and even fewer Christians with its Palestinian ancestors a majority dating back to at least the Twelfth Century.
Contentious and controversial from the beginning, the backstory of Balfour reveals that the much quoted Declaration required a dedicated bureaucratic effort to satisfy the Arab world that the Brits would support an independent nation state in exchange for their opposition to the Ottoman Empire in WW I. There was a complex politicization process perpetrated by influential UK diplomats intent on establishing a Zionist political ideology in Palestine as a necessary participant in the New World Order that was yet to unfold.
As the International Zionist Federation organized and solidified itself in the 1800s and early Twentieth century, the strong-willed Russian Bolshevik Jews provided the Talmudic dogma which greatly influenced the creation of a Zionist Palestine. Those Zionists relied on questionable biblical references that were a foreign concept to the more cultured European Jews. Today’s Zionists are blind to the truth there is no divinely inspired protection for nations that behave as a hate-filled terrorist military dictatorship that murders defenseless citizens and their children.
Serious discussion about Palestine’s future began in 1914 just as WW I was beginning with consequential talks between Secretary of War General Herbert Kitchener and the Emir of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali of the Hashemite clan; a lineage descended directly from the Prophet Muhammad and world leader of Islam. In anticipation of the Ottoman collapse, agreement to the Damascus Protocol confirmed Arab support against Ottoman in exchange for recognition of an Arab independent state.
Kitchener further pledged the UK would “…guarantee the independence, rights and privileges of the Sharifate against all external foreign aggression, in particular,” and to acknowledge and establish boundaries for an independent Arab nation. Those proposed borders ran from the 37th parallel north on the southern border of Turkey, bounded in the east by Persia and the Persian Gulf, in the west by the Mediterranean Sea and in the south by the Arabian Sea.
By June, 1915, the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon, High Commissioner of Egypt and Hussein bin Ali began an exchange authorized by Foreign Secretary Edward Grey that continued through March, 1916 with a series of ten letters. That correspondence ostensibly was to clarify details of the independent Arab state agreement which was assumed to include Palestine.
In Letter No. 4 on October 24, 1915, McMahon confirmed that “Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all regions demanded by the Sheriff of Mecca ” as well as ..”this declaration will assure you beyond all possible doubt of the sympathy of Great Britain towards the aspirations of ‘her friends’, the Arabs and will result in a firm and lasting alliance…”
By May 1916, the UK and France entered into a secret agreement that became Sykes-Picot Agreement to divvy up Ottoman into ‘spheres of influence’ after the war. The Brits received parts of southern Iraq, southern Israel, Palestine and Jordan with Palestine to be governed by an ‘international administration.’
On November, 2, 1917, the Balfour letter further complicated Palestine’s future by declaring Palestine to be subordinate with the Zionists. That letter suggested the usual blather about a ‘declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and that His Majesty’s government would favor “establishment of a national home for the Jewish people.”
Since WW I was not going well for the allies, there was also the promise the Brits made to the Zionists that if they were able to deliver the US into the war, they could have Palestine via Balfour.
Balfour contained numerous contradictions such as whether creating a ‘national home’ was consistent with international law or was it to be a full fledged Jewish nation state. Yet both Balfour and Prime Minister Lord George (1916 -1922) confirmed that the “intent was always to create a Jewish state.” Additionally, did the UK have authority over another sovereign nation as well as dictate the future of Palestinians who were not subjects of the British Empire and especially, how could Israel be awarded a right to self determination as a minority population when the Palestinian majority were denied the same self determination rights.
There was one section of Balfour’s final version that has been rarely recognized, apparently altered somewhere along the way, which required the Zionists to preserve ‘holy places’ like the al Aqsa Mosque which continues to be an intense object of hostilities especially by Israeli ‘settlers’ who assert ownership rights to every inch of the West Bank :
..”it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which will prejudice the civil and religious rights of Christian and all other non-Jewish communities in Palestine, and that the holy places and religious buildings and sites in Palestine shall be adequately protected.”
That one requirement to ‘adequately protect’ holy sites has never been acknowledged by Israel, much less protected.
By December, 2017, British/Allied forces captured Jerusalem while the fate of Palestine remained problematic. By 1919, the League of Nations which was structured to create one world government, incorporated Balfour and established a geopolitical Mandate for Palestine (1920-1948). That mandate claimed a legal status under international law involving the transfer of control from one nation to another during a time of war.
In February, 1919, the first Palestinian Arab conference of the Muslim Christian Association was founded by Arab leaders to oppose Zionist activity, the Balfour Declaration and the proposed Mandate.
One year later, delegates to the General Syrian Congress met in Damascus to again reject Balfour and elected Fayṣal I—son of Ḥusayn ibn Alī, who ruled the Hejaz— to be king of a united Syria (including Palestine). By July, 1920, the French forced Fayṣal to give up his newly founded kingdom of Syria.
The San Remo Conference of 1920 met to finalize new geopolitical borders and confirmed the Palestine Mandate that was meant to provide “administrative advice and assistance by a Mandate until such time as they are able to stand alone” in 1948.
As a result of the above, Sharif and the Arab leadership considered Sykes-Picot and Balfour as not binding given their understanding that terms of Correspondence with McMahon had been violated. When Hussein realized that Great Britain would refuse to recognize Arab independence in Palestine, he accused Britin of s breach of faith. He refused to ratify the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and, in response to a 1921 British proposal to sign a treaty accepting the Mandate system, refused stating he could not be expected to “affix his name to a document assigning Palestine to the Zionists and Syria to foreigners“.
In December, 1920, the Palestinians established an Executive Committee at the Congress in Haifa which recognized Palestine as a self-governing body, totally rejecting Zionist rights to Palestine which remained their position until 1948. The Congress and its Executive Committee were never formally recognized by the British and dissolved in 1934.
In November, 1921, a Palestinian delegation traveled to London to plead repudiation of Balfour and establishment of a democratically elected national parliament. In a typically lame response, Great Britain did “not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded in Palestine” did nothing to resolve the armed conflict that continued for the next one hundred years.
In July 1922, the emerging League of Nations approved the Mandate for Palestine, including the Balfour Declaration, stressing the Jewish historical connection with Palestine but no acknowledgement of the Palestinians ancestral ties to the Holy Land.
On September 29, 1923, the League’s Mandate officially came into force. Although in 1937, the Peel Commission saw the mandate as unworkable and recommended a Partition into three zones. The Arab Higher Committee unanimously opposed the Partition Plan and establishment of a Jewish state but no one was listening.
In November, 1947, after intense Zionist lobbying, the United Nations approved a modified Partition (33-13-10) awarding the Arab state with 42% of land and Israel receiving 56%. The partition never occurred as war began almost immediately with David ben Gurion boldly asserting a name change from Palestine with a Declaration of Independence creating the State of Israel. There was no orderly transition of power or any recognized authority of an established government which ultimately provided Israel with 75% of land including prime shore line real estate.
By 1948, the conflict accelerated with “750,000 Palestinians being displaced from their ancestral homes, 531 villages had been destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods were eliminated as the Zionists began their ethnic cleansing campaign. Thirty one confirmed massacres occurred from 1947 at Tirat Haife to Khirbat Ilan in Hebron until January, 1949. In the village of Kfar Qassim, 49 villagers returning from the field were murdered by Israel troops, in the 1950’s there was Qibaya, Samoa in the 1960’S, village of Galilee in 1976, Sabra and Shatila in 1982, Kfar Qana in1999, Wado Ara in 2000, Jenin Refugee Camp in 2002.”
“There has never been an end to Israel killing Palestinians.” Ilan Pappe The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine