Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (15 page)

By the dawn of the 20th century, with the exodus of Jews from Russia apparently unending, senior figures in Britain’s Conservative Establishment were of the view that England could not and should not take any more Jews—all the more so if Russia’s impoverished Jews were bringing revolutionary thoughts with them. England, it was argued, mainly in private, was reaching the limits of her economic capacity to absorb Jews. Underlying this view was the fear that when the number of Jews in England reached and passed “saturation point,” the non-Jewish majority would turn against all the Jews in its midst.

In the hearts and minds of the earlier Jewish immigrants, those for whom assimilation in their new homeland, England, had been, on the whole, a rewarding and comforting experience, the alarm bells were ringing. They feared that the growing presence of their impoverished co-religionists from the East would spark anti-Semitism which would engulf them and put at risk their own hard won status, rights and freedoms. So great was their fear that Britain’s assimilated Jews put pressure on the newly-arrived immigrants to return to the Russia they had left because of poverty and persecution. At a point the Chief Rabbi of England appealed to Russia’s Jews to stay at home and not even to think about coming to England.

In 1902 the British parliament started to debate an Aliens Exclusion Bill. Though it was not stated openly, its main purpose was to put Britain off limits to Russia’s Jews. Herzl came to London to make a representation on behalf of the Zionists. He argued that parliament should not pass the Bill and that, instead of it, the British government should support Zionism.

From his diaries we also know of a private conversation Herzl had with Lord (Lionel) Rothschild. In the course of it Herzl said that he, Herzl, “would incidentally be one of those wicked persons to whom English Jews might well erect a monument because I saved them from an influx of East European Jews, and also perhaps from anti-Semitism.”
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Herzl was obviously confident that the British would offer him something.

What they did offer him in due course, but as a substitute for Palestine, was the Highlands of East Africa in the Kenya of today. Britain’s Prime Minister of the time was Arthur James Balfour, who was to become the first of Israel’s three Godfathers (the second was Adolf Hitler and the third was President Truman). From the perspective of the British government, a Zionist colony in East Africa would serve the strategic interests of empire rather well; but the immediate virtue of the proposal was that it offered the best available way of preventing by diversion more Jews from entering Britain—if Herzl accepted the proposition and could sell it to his Zionist leadership colleagues.

Herzl, who was not religious, did accept the Kenya Highlands but was overruled by his leadership colleagues. For them it was Palestine or nothing. When subsequently Herzl indicated his willingness to accept other bits of Britain’s empire as a substitute for Palestine, his leadership colleagues said they would resign if he did.

According to Brenner’s detailed and intimate research, it was only Herzl’s premature death in 1904 that prevented the internal collapse of the Zionist movement. Herzl’s immediate successor was David Wolffsohn, but it was the man who was to lead the WZO after him, and who was fated to become Israel’s first president, who did the deal with Britain that gave Zionism enough of what it needed to be able to assert that its ludicrous claim on Palestine was legitimate.

That man was Dr. Chaim Weizmann, a brilliant scientist whose speciality was developing explosive substances for bigger and better bangs on battlefields; and who would prove that he had few if any equals in the art of diplomacy—putting the best possible gloss on everything often to the point of making wrong appear to be right.

Of Russian origin Weizmann was active in the Zionist movement from its birth. He went to university in Berlin and Geneva, and in 1904 he moved to London to take a faculty post in chemistry at the University of Manchester. Then, during World War I, he was asked to direct a special laboratory the British government had established to improve the production of artillery shells.

From the moment of his arrival in London, Weizmann had set about the task of developing contacts with the British Establishment at the highest levels, and with Balfour in particular. Weizmann was more aware than most of Balfour’s anti-Semitism. As was subsequently to be revealed by the publication of some of Weizmann’s private letters, he had a particularly interesting conversation with Balfour on 12 December 1914. According to Weizmann, Balfour unburdened himself. “He told me how he once had a long talk with Cosima Wagner (the composer’s wife) at Bayreuth and that he shared many of her anti-Semitic ‘postulates’”.
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Weizmann obviously saw Balfour’s anti-Semitism as the magic carpet on which he could make Zionism fly. As the foreign minister in Britain’s wartime coalition government, Balfour, obviously, was going to be very supportive of the Zionist enterprise as the best way to prevent more Jews—impoverished, persecuted and potentially if not actually revolutionary Jews—from entering Britain.

Britain’s support for Zionism’s political ambitions in Palestine was made public on 2 November 1917. It was in the form of a short letter from Foreign Minister Balfour to Baron Lionel de Rothschild. Weizmann and his associates—not British Foreign Office mandarins—had done most of the drafting. Balfour’s main contribution was his signature. The actual text of what came to be called the Balfour Declaration was a mere 67 words, but they were more than enough to start the Armageddon clock ticking.

The complete text of Balfour’s letter was as follows (emphasis added):

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you on behalf of His Majesty’s Government the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations, which has been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet. His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object,
it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non- Jewish communities in Palestine
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or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely,
Arthur James Balfour

One of the things that made the Balfour Declaration such an astonishing document and commitment was that Britain had no right of any kind to give Palestine away, in whole or in part, to anybody.

As Cattan noted:

The British government, as author of the Balfour Declaration, possessed no sovereignty or dominion in Palestine enabling it to make a valid promise of any rights, whatever their nature and extent, in favour of the Jews of the world. It is immaterial whether these rights were meant to be territorial, political or cultural. On the date that the Balfour Declaration was made, Palestine formed part of Turkey, and neither its territory nor its people were under the jurisdiction of the British Government. The Declaration was void on the basis of the principle that a donor cannot give away what does not belong to him.
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In 1957 an article in the American Bar Association Journal by Sol M. Linowitz (who was to become an adviser to and a negotiator for President Carter) noted that Britain had had no sovereign rights over Palestine, no proprietary interest, and no authority to dispose of the land. It added: “The most significant and incontrovertible fact is, however, that by itself the (Balfour) Declaration was legally impotent.”
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The most astonishing thing about the wording of the Balfour Declaration was the way it concealed from public view a reality which, if it had been widely known, would have invited the conclusion that the document was bound to be the harbinger of catastrophe.

The concealed reality was the make-up of the population of Palestine. At the moment of the Balfour Declaration the Arabs of Palestine numbered about 670,000 and constituted 93 percent of the population. Jews then in Palestine numbered about 60,000 and constituted 7 percent of the population. There could not have been a more obvious indicator of strife and catastrophe to come if Zionism had its way. (And one does not need the benefit of hindsight to say so).

Equally telling was that those responsible for drafting the Balfour Declaration had been unable to bring themselves to acknowledge the existence of the Arabs of Palestine as a people. The term “Arab” or “Arabs” did not appear in the Balfour Declaration. It reduced the 93 percent Arab majority to “existing non-Jewish communities”. That was an expression, a formula, which could only have been invented to serve a hidden agenda.

The implication, which has its context in Chapter Four, is that the British government of the day, which had previously committed itself to independence for the Arabs including the Palestinians, was in such need of the Zionists and their influence that it was not prepared to overrule them, at least to the extent of insisting that the Arabs be recognised in the Balfour Declaration as Arabs and the majority community in Palestine.

Why would the Zionists have wanted such an important document to conceal the demographic reality and truth? Short answer: To make it easier for them, as they set about realising their territorial and political ambitions, to suppress and dispossess the Arabs of Palestine without troubling the conscience of the majority of Jews everywhere, especially those in Western Europe and North America.

In fact the first Zionist draft of the letter to which Balfour eventually put his signature had envisaged recognition by the British government of the whole of Palestine as “the national home of the Jewish people”. The first Zionist draft was also without safeguard for the rights of the majority Arab population. It was only at the insistence of anti-Zionist British Jews, and Montagu in particular, that the final text of the letter as signed by Balfour included a safeguard for the rights of the “existing non-Jewish communities” in Palestine.

For their part Zionist leaders were not concerned with what was legally or morally right. Or wrong. What they wanted, and what they got, was a document which allowed them to assert that Zionism’s claim to Palestine had been recognised by a major power and that, as a consequence, the Zionist enterprise was a legitimate one.

Why did Britain decide to play the Zionist card in 1917?

Before coming to grips with the answer we must look at why Britain, previously, had played the Arab card; and at how, having played it, Britain then betrayed the Arabs, the Arabs of Palestine most of all.

The context in which Britain played both cards was the upheaval and slaughter of World War I.

For World War I Britain and the Allies (including Tsarist Russia and, eventually, America) mobilised about 42,000,000 men and lost, killed in action, about 5,000,000. Germany and the Axis powers (including Turkey) mobilised about 23,000,000 and lost, killed in action, about 3,400,000. Slaughter does not seem to be an adequate word. The total number of wounded combatants on both sides was about 21,000,000.

All that need concern us by way of essential background is imperial Britain’s war aims. Fundamentally Britain went to war to protect and expand its empire. The British Establishment (political and military leaders, Whitehall mandarins, leading industrialists, their bankers and media barons) believed that maintaining the British Empire was the key to ensuring Britain’s economic prosperity at a time when Britain’s industrial supremacy was increasingly being challenged—by Germany especially, but also America.

By 1914 Germany had established military predominance in Europe. One British war aim was to destroy Germany’s navy.

Britain’s initial strategic concern with regard to the Middle East (and India) was to keep its
entente
with Russia going. If that broke down there was the danger of a renewed Russian threat to British interests in the Middle East (and India). Later in the war there was also the matter of trying to prevent the victory of communism in Russia.

So far as the Arab part of the decomposing Turkish Empire was concerned, Britain’s intention was to take as much of it as she could get. In competition with her ally, France.

With World War I underway the first British promise of support in return for services to be rendered went to the Arabs, not the Zionists. And they, the Arabs, were to make the mistake of trusting the British.

At the time Arab leaders were preoccupied with the task of trying to secure their independence from the Turks.

For Britain’s purposes the most influential Arab leader was Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca (the custodian of Islam’s Holy Places). He was the leader of the Hashemites—descendants of the prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam. Hussein’s domain was the Arabian peninsula—the Arab world east of the Suez Canal, a large part of which was to become Saudi Arabia. The chunk of it that Hussein regarded as his own was the Hedjaz, the western region that bordered the Red Sea and contained the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. Hussein’s mission—he declared himself king of the Hedjaz in 1916—was to make emerging Arab nationalism a potent enough force to secure independence from the Turks.