The phrasing of the Balfour agreement, a classic colonial document, implied that the majority Palestinian population had no name, nor rights, and no voice. They were referred to as the existing “non-Jewish communities,” while the minority Jews were identified as a “people.”
The letter was imbedded with ambiguities. Its British authors, for example, eschewed the word “state,” using the more obscure phrase “establishment of a national home.” In the initial draft, Zionist leaders pushed for the phrase “the national home of the Jewish people,” to imply prior residence and to ensure that the whole of Palestine would be exclusively Jewish.
The phrase establishment of a home “in Palestine” could be understood to mean a community, settlement or something else; not the entire area. The extent of the proposed Jewish homeland was never made clear.
While Balfour’s public pledge was written on behalf of his government, it was approved in advance by Britain’s wartime allies – France, Italy, the Vatican and the United States – whose consensus gave it international legitimacy.
It is important to note that America shares responsibility for the Balfour letter. President Woodrow Wilson’s advanced approval of the document had a decisive effect on the judgment of the British cabinet.
The 69th US Congress, in June 1922, passed the Lodge-Fish joint resolution, favoring a home for Jews in Palestine. The joint resolution, which employed language nearly identical to the Balfour letter, was introduced by Rep Hamilton Fish III (R-NY) and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA), and signed on 21 September 1922 by President Warren G Harding.
The United States, in 1924, bound itself further to the principles of the Balfour Declaration by signing the Anglo-American Convention. The US endorsed the treaty in order to protect American interests and rights under the British mandate of Palestine, that had been approved by the newly created League of Nations in 1920.
The Balfour Declaration became a formidable instrument in the hands of European Zionists in their effort to transform a religion into a nation. They were acutely aware that appropriating and colonizing an already populated land could only be achieved through force. Inevitably, their idealized vision of a Jewish state has emerged as a racist outlaw entity.
Israeli barbarity was certain. It was evinced early on in the ideology of Russian-born Zionist leader and founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940). Jabotinsky – foundational ideologue for Israel’s right-wing political bloc, particularly the Likud – argued that morality and conscience could not dictate Zionist policy and that Zionists had to accept the fact that extremism and force were integral to accomplishing Jewish statehood. Hence, the genocidal strategies Israel has practiced for 78 years – the mass displacement and ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians that the Israeli Occupation Forces have described as “mopping up” and “mowing the lawn”.
Zionism’s founders also understood that they needed the patronage of an imperial power to fulfill their objectives. With the decline of the “perfidious Albion” after the Second World War, the United States assumed Britain’s imperial role and patronage of the Zionist colony. Since that time, London’s Ten Downing Street has essentially subcontracted its foreign policy to Washington, while Israel has become inseparable from the White House and the US Congress.
Undoubtedly, the 67-word declaration served as a tool for the British empire’s interests, as has every US-Israeli agreement and accord, masquerading as peace.
The Trump administration’s corporate-inspired blueprint for Gaza is simply Balfour repackaged; the latest phase in the 100-year old imperial investment in the Zionist settler-colonial project.
Gazans have shown the world what courage looks like under brutal occupation. It has also revealed how Israel has grown accustomed to and embraced violence and the sense of superiority it gives.
Tel Aviv has used the siege, starvation and bombardment of Gaza to erode the individual and collective dignity and strength of the Palestinian people, forcing Gazans to negotiate their dignity to stay alive.
Excerpted: ‘From Declaration to Dispossession: The Theft of Palestinian Land and the Birth of Israel’.
Courtesy: Counterpunch.org