April/May 1992, Page 11, 50

The Historical Record

The Balfour Declaration's Legacy

By Andrew I. Killgore

"His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors 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 the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

-The Balfour Declaration (Nov. 2, 1917)

"The British government hoped that the [Balfour] Declaration would rally Jewish opinion, especially in the United States, to the side of the Allies. . ."

-Encyclopedia Britannica-15th Edition

Named for Lord Arthur James Balfour, British prime minister from 1902 to 1906 and foreign secretary (minister) from 1916 to 1919, the Balfour Declaration is 75 years old this year. Its Byzantine circumlocutions made three promises: to establish a Jewish state in Palestine; to protect the rights of the indigenous Palestinians ("the existing non-Jewish communities," then 95 percent of the total population of Palestine); and to protect the rights of Jews in other countries.

The Declaration became better known than its author, whose reputation has faded. Why the document was issued at all has never been satisfactorily explained. Even 75 years later, the pertinent Foreign Office archives remain sealed.

The Declaration was a classic contract. A promise for a promise. With a difference. Britain's promise was public. A Jewish state in Palestine. The World Zionist Organization's promise was secret. To help bring the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. Objections from ranking British Jews that their status in Britain might suffer if a Jewish state were established had delayed the Declaration from 1916 to late 1917.

So the United States was actually in the war before the Balfour Declaration was issued. But in throwing the whole weight of the British Empire behind the "charter" of a Jewish state, as the Balfour Declaration has been described, Britain gave powerful new credibility to what until that time had been perceived as the rather shabby "myth of Jewish power."

The myth had taken on substance with the issuance, supposedly by Czarist Russia's secret police, of a famour forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Fraudulently inspired around the turn of the century, the protocols gave credence to the myth that Jews and Freemasons were scheming to undercut Christianity and take over the world.

Myths aside, the Balfour Declaration and its three promises were real. Promise number one materialized on May 15, 1948, when Israel was established on 78 percent of the territory of Palestine. The seemingly impossible had been achieved. Outsiders from Europe and other countries had been awarded 53 percent of Palestine by a U.N. vote, and seized another 25 percent by force of arms. A military and political miracle.

But it was a disaster for the Palestinians, who were to have been the beneficiaries of promise number two. Instead of having their "rights" protected in the 47 percent of Palestine the U.N. allowed them to keep, the Israelis seized half of it and Jordan seized the rest. Then Israel seized even that from Jordan.

More than half of today's six million Palestinians are scattered around the world. None has ever been compensated for loss of home, land, job or inheritance.

Palestinian citizens of Israel proper are denied many rights because they lack all-important "Jewish nationality." Those in Gaza and the West Bank have no rights at all. More than 16,000 currently are imprisoned in Israel on unspecified charges and without recourse to the law. More than 1,000 have been shot dead or beaten to death in the past four years; 100,000 have been wounded during the same period. Others have been expelled without trial, had their houses knocked down, their trees destroyed and their land stolen. A disgrace. Doubly so in an era of human rights. For all Americans, who pay for it, it is beyond shame.

The rights of Jews outside Israel? This again raises the Jewish power theme. Did Britain really believe in 1917 that American Jews had the power to help bring America into the war? The notion must have had credence at the time. Otherwise, why issue the Declaration in the first place?

The mood in London was bleakly pessimistic in early 1917. The blood-drenched Battle of the Somme, from July to November 1916, had proved that France and Britain could not defeat Germany without U.S. help.

As Winston Churchill later wrote, Britain was so close to defeat that any straw had to be grasped. So Zionist claims of influence in America, surely exaggerated, looked enticing enough for Britain to act upon.

The U.S. entered World War I over the issue of unrestricted German submarine warfare that threatened American commerce with Britain. Whether that was President Woodrow Wilson's real concern, or just a pretext to provide the help the Allies needed, Jewish influence seems to have had little to do with the U.S. decision to join the Allies. But, a decade and a half after Germany's defeat, and its descent into ruinous inflation that destroyed its economy and its middle class, did the newly empowered German Nazis know this? Or had they, like the Russians and the British before them, come to believe the myth of Jewish power?

Was Hitler's venomous hatred of Jews based on misapprehension that they had brought about Germany's World War I defeat? Or did he seize upon a convenient scapegoat to account for Germany's ruin?

Without the Balfour Declaration of 1917, would defeated Germany have turned on Europe's Jews for revenge in 1933? Would millions of Jews and others have died in Nazi concentration and death camps? The historical possibility that many of the worst horrors that accompanied World War II might all have been avoided cannot be dismissed.

After promise number one of the Declaration was realized in 1948, the political miracle of the Jewish state created growing resentment and hostility from its Arab neighbors-Muslim and Christian. European relations with Israel gradually moved from warm to cool to cold in response to Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights and Israeli resistance to peace initiatives.

In America, albeit more slowly, very warm sentiments are evolving into deep resentment stemming from the Israel Lobby's ruthless abuse of its power in Congress and the shameless deceptions by its supporters in the media. There is open administration dismay at the relentless efforts by Israel and its American apologists to torpedo the "peace process," upon the success of which vital U.S. interests throughout the oil-rich Middle East depend.

This growing Western disenchantment, in turn, has lead to an economy that doesn't work at all in Israel. Highly trained Russian immigrants, who would have gone to America if they had been given the chance, sweep the streets, turn to prostitution and rummage through garbage cans for food.

It has become a state where fascistic Likudists would expel all of the Palestinians and seize all of the lands in which the Palestinians have lived for millennia. A land where the endless debate over "Who is a Jew?" might define Judaism in a way that would deal most American and Western European Jews right out of the faith. A land from which 50,000 Israelis depart yearly, never to return. And a land whose leaders label the U.S. president and his secretary of state "anti-Semites" for not giving Israel $10 billion unconditionally so that it can further subvert U.S. policy and interests throughout the Middle East and the world at large.

Israel's founders exploited the myth of Jewish power to give birth to the Balfour Declaration. Now, 75 years later, with only one of the Declaration's three promises fulfilled, Israel lives with the legacy of the myth: A Holocaust in Europe. A hate-filled Middle East. An increasingly baffled and insecure America. It is the triumph of the myth over its makers.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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