“… If we had invested in the Arab problem a tenth of the energy, the passion, the ingenuity, the resourcefulness which we developed in order to gain the support of Britain, France, the US and Weimar Germany, our destiny in the development of Israel may have been quite different.… We were not ready for compromises; we did not regard it as a major problem…. We did not make sufficient efforts to get, if not the full agreement of Arabs, at least their acquiescence to a Jewish state, which I think would have been possible. That was the original sin.” — Dr. Nahum Goldmann, President of the World Jewish Congress, 1974.[1]
i]
The owl of Minerva in Roman mythology represented wisdom and the German idealist philosopher Hegel in the 19th century borrowed the symbolism of Minerva’s owl to note that it took flight at dusk, meaning understanding and wisdom came to people about events in history after their passage. It might thus be said that in the fading lights of dusk in which Minerva’s owl took flight over Gaza following the events of 7 October 2023, one could discern the approaching inexorable denouement of Israel as a colonial-settler state in the Levant.
The entire Zionist project in the making of Israel was built upon and sustained by lies and, consequently, there cannot be any avoidance from its eventual karmic – the interlocking chain of cause and effect – dismantling as a historical aberration like other similarly built colonial-settler states that got dismantled, such as French Algeria or the white-minority regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa. This eventual dismantling was foreseen and forewarned by Jews and non-Jews alike who were not gulled by Theodor Herzl’s manifesto, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), published in Vienna in 1896 for the scam it was and the effort he set in motion in bringing to fruition his imagined Zionist agenda. Herzl proposed,
Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.[2]
Such a “grant” for statehood for Jews in and of Europe, as was the Hungarian-born Herzl (1860-1904), and thereby resolve Europe’s “Jewish problem” could only be provided by a European great power, such as Britain or Germany, or acquired as a favour in some form of lease or purchase from a non-European imperial power as was the Ottoman Empire then in control of Palestine and the adjoining territories of the Levant. This was a scam, transparently obvious, that the Jewish state however packaged if it were to come about in any “portion of the globe” would have to be hatched by a European power whose imperial interest was served by the colonial-settler state established for European Jews. Israel Zangwill, Herzl’s friend and associate, came up with the phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land”, or borrowed the original and re-phrased it, so as to hoist the scam into Europe’s great power politics of the late nineteenth century. Herzl was sufficiently astute to know that there was no such empty land without a people, especially in Palestine, where the location for Jewish statehood based on ancient Biblical claims might be sold profitably to both European Jews and the sought after European great powers. It would require emptying out the land “granted” to establish such a colonial-settler state. And Herzl obligingly described how this emptying land of its people would be done. He wrote,
If we wish to found a State today, we shall not do it in the way which would have been the only possible one a thousand years ago. It is foolish to revert to old stages of civilization, as many Zionists would like to do. Supposing, for example, we were obliged to clear a country of wild beasts, we should not set about the task in the fashion of Europeans of the fifth century. We should not take spear and lance and go out singly in pursuit of bears; we would organize a large and active hunting party, drive the animals together, and throw a melinite bomb into their midst (emphasis added).[3]
Herzl was supposedly Moses of Zionism, the founder who had the vision of statehood for his people, the Jews of Europe, in the age of European nationalism following the French revolution of 1789, while he would be denied by an early death to see his vision materialize. But he gave enough thought on how his vision was to be given shape by ruthlessly emptying any portion of the globe granted to them by a European great power, and this would necessarily require a ruthlessness equal for the task of emptying the land of its people likened to wild beasts by pioneers of Zionism and their progeny as colonial-settlers in building and holding on to their acquired statehood. Herzl’s language, as in “drive the animals together”, represented the thinking of Europeans about the lesser peoples of Africa and Asia in the high noon of imperialism and colonialism. Africa was described as the “dark continent” waiting for Europeans to explore, map, conquer, and settle by the white man; and the journey of exploration, conquest, and plunder into Africa’s “heart of darkness”, as in Joseph Conrad’s novella about a fictional journey published serially in a London magazine in 1899, captured the triumphal mood of that Victorian era whose finest and ugliest representative was Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), the mining magnate, politician, and ruthless agent of British imperialism in that so-called dark continent. Herzl had Rhodes in his sight to raise money for his Zionist agenda of statehood for European Jews and, according to Amos Elon, Herzl’s biographer, if Rhodes wished he could single-handedly finance the project of the aspiring Moses of Zionism but declined opining that Palestine and Syria should be left for Germany since England could not rule the world.[4]
I first came to read Herzl’s manifesto sometime in the mid-1970s while reading about the First World War with special interest on the Arab Revolt during the war, and of the Sykes-Picot Agreement in the making of the modern Middle East. I was gobsmacked by the above quote from Herzl’s manifesto, of emptying the land of its native population by the use of melinite bombs. The term “genocide” was yet to be coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), a Polish Jew, for the mass massacres by Nazi Germany of Jews, Poles, Russians, gypsies during the Second World War; however what Herzl had in mind, or intended, in the pursuit of his Zionist project was ironically engaging in acts that would amount to genocide, as spelled out in Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide approved by the United Nations in December 1948 and entered into force as of January 1951.[5]
The decade of the nineteen-seventies was packed with events that in keeping up with them seemed to me a full-time job for a war refugee, as I was in finding refuge in Canada from a war-ravaged Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, and struggling to make ends meet while attending university as a part-time student. I had fallen in love with the story of the Middle East in those early decades of the last century after watching David Lean’s hugely successful movie masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia. Lean sucked me into a life long fascination with and study of Middle East history and politics.
The seventies were the pivotal years for the Middle East, and the world of Islam began to loom large in global affairs. The genocide in East Pakistan triggered by the military rulers of Pakistan was silently supported by Nixon and Kissinger given their closely guarded policy of the opening to Mao’s China with the highly secretive assistance of the Pakistani military dictator General Yahya Khan, and Nixon’s visit to Beijing in February 1972. The India-Pakistan war of December 1971 that dismembered Pakistan, which I witnessed and experienced, faded away quickly with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur war of October 1973 that engulfed the Middle East, triggered the quadrupling of oil price, and sent the world economy into a tail spin. When the Arab-Israeli conflict paused momentarily, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army in April 1975 bringing to an end America’s gruesome involvement in more than a decade long war in Vietnam. But ahead of Saigon’s fall to the NVA, the Cambodian Communist party, also known as Khmer Rouge, seized power in Phnom Penh, the capital, and began on a massive scale repression and murder of Cambodian people amounting to over two million killed. The massacre in Cambodia ended when the Vietnamese army invaded the country in December 1978, captured Phnom Penh the following month, and drove Khmer Rouge leaders to take refuge in the neighbouring jungles of Thailand. As details of Khmer Rouge atrocities began pouring out of Cambodia, a populist revolution triumphed in February 1979 in Tehran with the toppling of the American installed Shah of Iran that ended monarchical rule of the Pahlavi kings, and an Islamic Republic was established under the leadership of the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. And before the 1970s ended the Communist leadership in Moscow under Brezhnev sent Soviet troops into Afghanistan setting the stage for a decade long insurgency war in that country supported by American arms, Saudi petrodollars, and Pakistani logistics that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the emergence of Taliban fighters drawing America into more than two decades of warfare that ended with American humiliation in the fall of Kabul to the Afghan forces under Taliban leadership in August 2021.
Back to the mid-seventies, my encounter with Herzl was brief and my memory of that encounter faded only to be revived with the events of October 7, which led me to write a Substack essay (also published in the Unz Review) on Herzl and Pope Pius X when Herzl in the final months of his life lobbied the Vatican and the Ottoman Caliph for support for his Zionist project.[6] The Pope and the Caliph politely but unambiguously turned him down. Herzl died thirteen years before a letter dated 2nd of November 1917 by Lord Balfour (1848-1930), the Foreign Secretary in the war cabinet of Prime Minister Lloyd George (1863-1945), was addressed to Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild indicating the British government favoured “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. The impact of this letter was to be momentous. Alfred M. Lilienthal, an American Jewish historian-lawyer in a massive study of Zionism and Israel-U.S. relations, wrote, “Subsequent events, which have moved the Middle East to the center of the world stage, are intimately related to the ambiguous sixty-seven word Balfour Declaration set forth in that letter.”[7]
The war time decision of the British government headed by Prime Minister Lloyd George, as conveyed by Balfour, was a mighty leap forward for the World Zionist Organization founded twenty years earlier in August 1897 by Herzl at the First Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland, in securing the indispensable support and patronage of a great power for the Zionist agenda of statehood for European Jews. Another three decades later and following another World War, the scam Herzl had conceived in the last decade of the nineteenth century was given birth towards the end of the first half of the twentieth century.
ii]
It might be said that without the Balfour Declaration there likely would not have been a Jewish state brought about by the United Nations Resolution 181 (II) of 29 November 1947.[8] UN Resolution 181 (II) partitioned into two states – an Arab state and a Jewish state – the Mandate for Palestine of the former territory of the defeated Ottoman Empire assigned to Britain based on Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations at the San Remo conference in April 1920.[9] And the two Zionist Jews instrumental in the issue of the Balfour Declaration were Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) and Louis Brandeis (1856-1941).
Weizmann was born in Motol, Belarus, which was part of then Czarist Russian Empire. He moved to Germany and Switzerland for his studies in chemistry, received his doctorate in organic chemistry in 1899, joined the University of Geneva as a lecturer in 1901 and migrated to Britain in 1905. He had joined a group of Zionist intellectuals while in Berlin and attended in 1898 the Second Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, meeting Herzl. According to his biographer, Jehuda Reinharz, Weizmann’s reputation as a first-rate scientist gained him entrance into the circle of the British ruling elite prior to 1914.[10] The biographical entry in the Jewish Virtual Library reads, “Weizmann’s scientific assistance to the Allied forces in World War I brought him into close contact with British leaders, enabling him to play a key role in the issuing of the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917, in which Britain committed itself to the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine.”[11]
While Weizmann was the Zionist representative in London in contact with members of Britain’s war cabinet, in particular with Lord Balfour and Winston Churchill, Louis Brandeis was similarly closely associated with key members of the Wilson administration in Washington and in person connected with President Woodrow Wilson. Brandeis was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to immigrant parents from Prague, Bohemia, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The entry for Brandeis in the Jewish Virtual Library notes that after studying law at Harvard University, he settled in Boston and became a successful lawyer. He was “active in Zionist affairs during the First World War when he accepted the role of Chairperson of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs. Brandeis had a major impact on the American branch of the Zionist movement, drawing to it a number of sympathizers, and improving its organization and its finance.”[12] In 1912 Brandeis supported for president Wilson’s nomination as candidate for the Democrats, and President Wilson (1856-1924) on 28 January 1916 nominated Brandeis to the Supreme Court as Associate Justice and the first Jew to this august position. This was a controversial nomination that led the Senate for the first time to hold a public hearing never before done for a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court. The Senate Judiciary Committee held the nomination for four months before submitting it to the Senate that confirmed Brandeis’s appointment by a vote of 47-22 on 1 June 1916.
President Wilson campaigned for his re-election in 1916 to keep America out of Europe’s Great War. But soon after the March 1917 inauguration for his second term, Wilson asked Congress on April 2 to declare war against Germany due to Berlin’s renewed policy on submarine warfare and its so-called treachery to lure Mexico against the United States revealed in the Zimmerman Telegram[13], which the Congress obliged with votes in the Senate and the House. In the background of Brandeis’s appointment to the Supreme Court was, as John Beaty wrote, his influence as a Zionist over Wilson in America’s entrance into the war and “its consequent prolongation with terrible blood losses to all participants, especially among boys and young men of British, French, and German stock. Although Britain had promised self-rule to the Palestine Arabs in several official statements by Sir Henry MacMahon, the British High Commissioner for Egypt, by Field Marshal Lord Allenby, Commander in Chief of British Military forces in the area, and by others, President Wilson was readily won over to a scheme concocted later in another compartment of the British government.”[14]
John Beaty (1890-1961) opened for Americans of his generation, and those after them, a window from which to examine the politics of their country in the first half of the last century. He occupied a very sensitive perch inside the government which made him privy to information that otherwise would not be available to the public. He served during the Second World War as a Colonel of the Military Intelligence Service. He had been an academic teaching English at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas beginning in 1919 and retiring in 1957 after an interlude during his war service. Ron Unz, publisher of The Unz Review, in recalling Beaty wrote, “During those war years, his government role had been an important one, serving as Chief of the Historical Section while also being responsible for summarizing all available American intelligence and producing the daily briefing report distributed to the White House and all of our other top political and military leaders… Given such crucial activities, there were probably few Americans more familiar with nearly all aspects of our wartime information than Beaty when he returned to civilian life in 1947.”[15] It was this inside knowledge and warnings about the corrosive influence of un-American values in American body politics, such as Zionism, that made John Beaty controversial in the post-Truman years with the publication in 1951 of The Iron Curtain Over America.
The scheme of supporting statehood for European Jews in Palestine by Britain that was hatched by those officials in London, contrary to the promises made by MacMahon and Allenby to Palestine Arabs, would be appealing to Brandeis for influencing Wilson. In Beaty’s telling, this pro-Zionist machination out of London proceeded as follows,
This scheme, Zionism, attracted the favor of the Prime Minister, Mr. David Lloyd George, who, like Wilson, had with prominent Jews certain close relations… Thus, according to S. Landman, in his paper “Secret History of the Balfour Declaration” (World Jewry, March 1, 1935), after an “understanding had been arrived at between Sir Mark Sykes and Weizmann and Sokolow, it was resolved to send a secret message to Justice Brandeis that the British Cabinet would help the Jews to gain Palestine in return for active Jewish sympathy and support in U.S.A. for the allied cause so as to bring about a radical pro-ally tendency in the United States.” An article, “The Origin of the Balfour Declaration” (The Jewish Chronicle, February 7, 1936) is more specific. According to this source, certain “representatives of the British and French Governments” had been convinced that “the best and perhaps the only way to induce the American President to come into the war was to secure the co-operation of Zionist Jewry by promising them Palestine.” In doing so “the Allies would enlist and mobilize the hitherto unsuspectedly powerful force of Zionist Jewry in America and elsewhere.” Since President Wilson at that time “attached the greatest possible importance to the advice of Mr. Justice Brandeis,” the Zionists worked through him and “helped to bring America in.”[16]
The Balfour Declaration was a poison pill and a gambit by the British war leaders at a period during the war in its third year when Allied victory appeared remote and uncertain, and the urgency to break the stalemate in the European theatre of war increasingly pressing. A promise made to Zionists for a Jewish homeland in Palestine could tip the balance by the influence brought to bear on the American president to make common cause with Allied powers in making the world “safe for democracy”, a progressive ideal that likely would positively be received by the president. But to the hard-headed men in London responsible for protecting and advancing imperial-colonial interests, a promised Jewish homeland regardless of whatever Christian Zionist sentiments moved the minds and hearts of some of the political leaders, as in the case of Prime Minister Lloyd George[17], a promised and dependent colonial-settler homeland/state for Jews in Palestine would secure a land bridge connecting Egypt and the Suez Canal through Mesopotamia and Iran with India, the crown jewel of the British Empire. Here was Herzl’s scam of securing a land “grant” in the making of Zionist agenda, a statehood for European Jews, that eventually came to fruition in the letter Balfour was authorized by his government to address Baron Rothschild with the promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Before Balfour’s letter was despatched, however, there was a strong dissenting view conveyed to the government. Edwin Montagu (1879-1924) was the only Jewish member of the British War Cabinet, and his memorandum to the Cabinet in August 1917 delayed the release of Balfour’s letter by over two months. David Fromkin, an American historian, in his account of the war wrote, “Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, led the opposition group within the Cabinet. He, along with his cousin, Herbert Samuel, and Rufus Isaacs (Lord Reading) had broken new ground for their co-religionists: they had been the first Jews to sit in a British Cabinet. The second son of a successful financier who had been ennobled, Montagu saw Zionism as a threat to the position in British society that he and his family had so recently, and with so much exertion, attained. Judaism, he argued, was a religion, not a nationality, and to say otherwise was to say that he was less than 100 percent British.”[18] But Fromkin also noted that Montagu’s non-Zionism was not simply personal, that it reflected the views of a majority of Jews. “As of 1913, the last date for which there were figures,” Fromkin wrote, “only about one percent of the world’s Jews had signified their adherence to Zionism. British Intelligence reports indicated a surge of Zionist feeling during the war in the Pale of Russia, but there were no figures either to substantiate or to quantify it. In Britain, the Conjoint Committee, which represented British Jewry in all matters affecting Jews abroad, had been against Zionism from the start and remained so.”[19] The figure of 11,500,000 for the world Jewish population that Fromkin cited in his footnote came from the American Jewish Yearbook for 1909-10 and was referred to in the 11th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica under the subject heading of “Jews.” The support for Zionism and its Herzlian agenda of nationhood was miniscule among the emancipated Jews of Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands, and where it existed in any noticeable numbers it was among Jews of Eastern Europe yet to be emancipated from their ghettos. But when given a choice and the opportunity, the majority of Eastern European Jews between 1880s and the outbreak of the war in 1914 had headed for America.
It is instructive to read Edwin Montagu’s memorandum of dissent to the members of the British War Cabinet in its entirety. Here I shall cite a few passages from the memorandum, since the Secretary of State for India was expressing his dissent when the subject of Balfour letter was in discussion within the cabinet, and with his responsibility for India he would have been briefed about how this would be received among Indians, especially the Muslims (by Montagu referred to as “Mahommedans”) of India who together constituted the largest Muslim population in the world. Montagu’s subject title for the memorandum was “On the Anti-Semitism of the Present (British) Government”, and he wrote,
I have chosen the above title for this memorandum, not in any hostile sense, not by any means as quarrelling with an anti-Semitic view which may be held by my colleagues, not with a desire to deny that anti-Semitism can be held by rational men, not even with a view to suggesting that the Government is deliberately anti-Semitic; but I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic in result will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world.
Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom… it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the “national home of the Jewish people”. I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.
I assert that there is not a Jewish nation… It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation: of the same race, perhaps, traced back through the centuries – through centuries of the history of a peculiarly adaptable race. The Prime Minister and M. Briand are, I suppose, related through the ages, one as a Welshman and the other as a Breton, but they certainly do not belong to the same nation.
When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants… I have always understood that this was the consequence of the building of the Tower of Babel, if ever it was built, and I certainly do not dissent from the view, commonly held, as I have always understood, by the Jews before Zionism was invented, that to bring the Jews back to form a nation in the country from which they were dispersed would require Divine leadership. I have never heard it suggested, even by their most fervent admirers, that either Mr. Balfour or Lord Rothschild would prove to be the Messiah.
I deny that Palestine is to-day associated with the Jews…The Ten Commandments were delivered to the Jews on Sinai. It is quite true that Palestine plays a large part in Jewish history, but so it does in modern Mahommedan history, and, after the time of the Jews, surely it plays a larger part than any other country in Christian history. The Temple may have been in Palestine, but so was the Sermon on the Mount and the Crucifixion (emphasis added).[20]
For a state to exist, two things are necessary, territory and population. The Zionist had neither when the Balfour Declaration was made public. Territory would have to be secured by the British, but none had any clue of where the Jewish population would arrive from. At the outbreak of the war in 1914 Jews in Palestine under Ottoman rule were estimated at 80,000. The numbers had declined to 65,000 by 1917. Palestine Arabs, Muslims and Christians, in that year were around 700,000.[21] According to Christopher Sykes, whose father was Sir Mark Sykes of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 secretly reached between English and French on the post-war Middle East, “The Jews of Palestine comprised less than ten percent of the whole population, and—a most important detail—only a minority of this minority were Zionists. The National Home depended from the beginning on immigration from abroad, and no one then had or could have the least idea how large an immigration would be attracted to Zion by the Balfour Declaration. Jews might arrive by the millions or only by the hundreds, and there was no reason for Jewish optimism in this respect. There had been no Jewish mass migration to Palestine in modern times. Nearly all migration from Russia in the nineteenth century had been to central Europe and the United States, and the doors of America were still wide open. For the Zionist leaders to have demanded a Jewish State, or for a British government to have sponsored one, might have been to invite ridicule and instant disaster on the whole venture. Yet the intention of a Jewish State could not be forgotten or the leader would be repudiated.”[22]
But these difficulties did not matter to the author of the Declaration or his government. In August 1919, less than two years after the Declaration, Balfour wrote a memorandum in which he stated that
in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.[23]
And so Herzl’s scam was adopted regardless of its consequences, moral and political, by the British government with the American president’s implicit concession, though in striving to maintain the façade of anti-colonialism Wilson sent to the Levant a two-man American Commission that Balfour referred to in his memo. This was the “King-Crane Commission” – (Dr. Henry Churchill King, president of the Oberlin College, Ohio; and Mr. Charles Richard Crane, businessman and friend of President Wilson) – or officially designated as the “1919 Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey” to report on the future of Syria and Palestine.
The Commission submitted its recommendations on 28 August 1919. The Commission’s report was, however, suppressed until released to the public more than three years later and published in the New York magazine “Editor and Publisher” on December 2, 1922. The Editorial Note at the top of the page of the magazine and below the headline “King-Crane Report on the Near East: A Suppressed Official Document of the United States Government” read:
Problems of the Near East again hold the attention of the peoples of the world, and as a result, all channels of information are flooded with propaganda that has as its source foreign interests, in many cases with selfish intent. Americans have but a limited knowledge of the hates and greeds that have repeatedly carried the peoples of the Near East into war and endangered the peace of the world. This report is founded upon impartial and thorough investigation by Americans for Americans and is presented at this time for guidance of editors and writers.[24]
From the Commission’s report, here are a few relevant extracts on Palestine and what the Commission found:
In his address of July 4, 1918, President Wilson laid down the following principle as one of the four great “ends for which the associated peoples of the world were fighting”: “The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of political relationship upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery.” If that principle is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine’s population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine—nearly nine-tenths of the whole—are emphatically against the entire Zionist program. The tables show that there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed than upon this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the peoples’ rights, though it kept within the forms of law.
It is to be noted also that the feeling against the Zionist program is not confined to Palestine, but shared very generally by the people throughout Syria, as our conferences clearly showed. More than 72 percent—1350 in all—of all the petitions in the whole of Syria were directed against the Zionist program. Only two requests—those for a united Syria and for independence—had a larger support. This general feeling was only voiced by the “General Syrian Congress,” in the seventh, eighth and tenth resolutions of their statement.
The Peace Conference should not shut its eyes to the fact that the anti-Zionist feeling in Palestine and Syria is intense and not lightly to be flouted. No British officer, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms. The officers generally thought that a force of not less than fifty thousand soldiers would be required even to initiate the program. That of itself is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist program, on the part of the non-Jewish population of Palestine and Syria. Decisions, requiring armies to carry them out, are sometimes necessary, but they are surely not gratuitiously to be taken in the interests of a serious injustice. For the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a “right” to Palestine, based on an occupation of two thousand years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.
There is a further consideration that cannot justly be ignored, if the world is to look forward to Palestine becoming a definitely Jewish state, however gradually that may take place. That consideration grows out of the fact that Palestine is “the Holy Land” for Jews, Christians, and Moslems alike. Millions of Christians and Moslems all over the world are quite as much concerned as the Jews with conditions in Palestine, especially with those conditions which touch upon religious feelings and rights. The relations in these matters in Palestine are most delicate and difficult. With the best possible intentions, it may be doubted whether the Jews could possibly seem to either Christians or Moslems proper guardians of the holy places, or custodians of the Holy Land as a whole. The reason is this: the places which are most sacred to Christians—those having to do with Jesus—and which are also sacred to Moslems, are not only not sacred to Jews, but abhorrent to them. It is simply impossible, under those circumstances, for Moslems and Christians to feel satisfied to have these places in Jewish hands, or under the custody of Jews. There are still other places about which Moslems must have the same feeling. In fact, from this point of view, the Moslems, just because the sacred places of all three religions are sacred to them, have made very naturally much more satisfactory custodians of the holy places than the Jews could be. It must be believed that the precise meaning, in this respect, of the complete Jewish occupation of Palestine has not been fully sensed by those who urge the extreme Zionist program. For it would intensify, with a certainty like fate, the anti-Jewish feeling both in Palestine and in all other portions of the world which look to Palestine as “the Holy Land”.
In view of all these considerations, and with a deep sense of sympathy for the Jewish cause, the Commissioners feel bound to recommend that only a greatly reduced Zionist program be attempted by the Peace Conference and even that, only very gradually initiated. This would have to mean that Jewish immigration should be definitely limited, and that the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up (emphasis added).[25]
In his August 1919 memorandum ahead of the anticipated release of the King-Crane Commission’s report, Balfour was derisively dismissive of what Dr. Henry King and Mr. Charles Crane would have learned from the people in Palestine and Syria invited to make presentations to their committee. The views of the inhabitants of the former provinces of the Ottoman Empire mattered little to Balfour and his government. Indeed, as Balfour further stated in that same memorandum,
In fact, so far as Palestine is concerned, the powers have made no statement of fact that is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.[26]
Balfour and his government knowingly and in full knowledge of the powers that mattered – France, Italy, and the United States – were bent upon inserting the promise of the Balfour Declaration made to Zionist Jews into Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations integrated into the Treaty of Versailles signed in Paris on June 28, 1919. A few months later in November the U.S. Senate led by the Republican majority leader and Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, for the first time in its history rejected a peace treaty denying President Wilson and his administration to seat the United States as a founding member of the League of Nations. As a result of the Senate vote, the report of the King-Crane Commission became moot, its recommendations disregarded by the British government.
Article 22 of the Covenant was the arrangement set up by the League to prepare the peoples in colonies and territories of the defeated Central Powers – Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Turkish Empire – for independence and self-governance. Article 22 (para. 2) read, “The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best undertake this responsibility, and who are willing to accept it, and that this tutelage should be exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League.”[27] Britain was given the mandatory powers over Palestine at a meeting of the League’s Supreme Council held at San Remo, Italy, on April 25, 1920 attended by representatives of the British Empire, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States (in the capacity of an observer).
Britain formally accepted the Mandate of Palestine with a written statement of understanding (procès-verbal) that as mandatory power its undertaking “would not involve the surrender of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, and recorded in the Covenant as “Note to I, 22”.[28] This procès-verbal was a cover provided for the insertion of the Balfour Declaration made at the San Remo meeting of April 25 into the Mandate of Palestine designated as an “A” type under Article 22 (para. 4). That this insertion was done backdoor at the League’s Supreme Council meeting, instead of in a full session of the League’s member-states at Geneva, was likely indicative that it would have not received a majority vote for being in violation of the Covenant. Hence, this political maneuver displayed supreme arrogance of power by which Prime Minister Lloyd George and Balfour as the Foreign Secretary were determined, despite the questionable legality of the Balfour Declaration in terms of international law, to turn Palestine into the promised national home for European Jews by opening its doors to them and thereby altering the demography of the Mandated territory. The accompanying “Data on Mandated Territories” in Article 22 showed the area for Palestine, according to the revised map of the Sykes-Picot Agreement,[29] from the leftbank on River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea amounted to 9,010 square miles with a population of 1,035,154; the area of Palestine east of the river was made into Transjordan with an area of 15,444 square miles and a population of 305,584.
Herzl’s scam was amplified by that of Britain by the insertion of the Balfour Declaration into Article 22 of the Covenant without seeking advisory opinion on its legality from the Permanent Court of International Justice at the Hague, Netherlands, established by the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the judicial organ of the League of Nations. “A portion of the globe” that Herzl had sought as a “grant” for statehood for European Jews was made available in the British Mandate of Palestine, but what was missing was the needed population of Jewish immigrants to turn the Mandate into the promised Jewish homeland. With less than one Jew among ten Palestinian Arabs, how to turn Herzl’s “grant” into an exclusive Jewish state became the sordid exercise spread over a century from then to the present of “emptying” the land with a people for “a people without a land”.
iii]
The premise of Herzl’s scam was that since the Jewish question was the source of anti-Semitism in Europe, its solution was to establish a statehood for European Jews. The political expression of this scam was Jewish nationalism, or political Zionism, as the remedy of the Jewish question.
There was negligible support for Herzl and political Zionism among assimilated Jews in the emancipated countries of western Europe, and a rejection of the notion of Jewish nation, as was expressed by Edwin Montagu in his memorandum to the British War Cabinet of Prime Minister Lloyd George. The orthodox religious Jews were more censorious in condemning Herzl and his ideas as profane and against Judaism. An example of rejection of the founder of political Zionism and his nationalist ideology was given in 1901 in a statement by the Holy Gerer Rebbe, the Sfas Emes, Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter (1847-1905) of Poland:
Now behold Satan has come and confused the world. There are threats from the leaders of the Zionists that a powerful danger is lurking behind our walls and that the power of the enemies of Israel is prevailing—Heaven forbid. It is therefore all the more incumbent upon us to protect ourselves from confusing the masses of the people. Everyone who has a brain in his skull will realize that the Zionists, through their nonsensical writings, will only increase hostility; if they continue in their brazenness to spread the libel that we are in revolt against the peoples and that we are a danger to the lands in which we reside, then their evil prophecy will be fulfilled—Heaven forbid…
A thick cloak rests over the eyes of the leaders of the Zionists. Only to their lack of faith and absence of belief in God do they fail to realize the extent of the danger involved in their promises to the masses of the peoples among whom we live, of all the delights of the world provided they give aid to the Zionists…
According to the Yalkut on Lech Lecho, the Holy One, blessed be He, will redeem Israel as a reward for piety and for faith in Him. Let no one imagine that the redemption and salvation of Israel will come through the Zionists.[30]
Another example from 1903 was the statement by the Lubbavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Shulem ben Schneersohn (1860-1920) of Lubavitch, Russia. Rabbi Schneerson stated,
Our brethren who fear the Lord, love the Holy Land through the divine feeling that is in them. Their will and delight in the Lord and in His service leads them to delight in the place which the Lord has chosen. This love is an inward feeling, a powerful inward love for this place that brings them actually to kiss its dust. That such is not the cause of the agitation for Zion raised by Herzl and Nordau is clear. When Herzl was in the Holy land, he was far removed from the Lord. He openly profaned the Torah by entering the Holy City on the holy Sabbath. He went to the site of the Sanctuary which even from an ordinary human point of view he should not have done, thus openly profaning the Sabbath in the Holy City and in the place of His temple, doing evil in the sight of the Lord.
This action was done with the special intention of displaying their unclean ideology and showing that Judaism is nationalism. The leader of the Zionists had set up the idol of nationalism, rebellion against the Lord and denial of Torah and commandments, on the very site of the Temple of the Lord.[31]
Herzl’s Zionist ideology would have remained in the margin of Jewish lives in Europe, as would have Bolshevism in Russia, had not the European carnage in the Great War of 1914-18 pushed Europe into ruin unlike any preceding wars on the continent. As William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem The Second Coming, published in 1920, in sort of a lament for Europe, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. It was the falling apart of Europe that became the context in which the Perfidious Albion, Britain, took under its wing Herzl’s scam as a tool for its imperial-colonial interest in the Middle East with the Balfour Declaration. But World War I was also the beginning of the end of the British Empire and Britain as a world power. As Britain’s decline accelerated in the midst of World War II, President Wilson’s Democrat party that bought into the Balfour Declaration under Brandeis’s bidding and influence helped turn the oldest republic, the United States, under President Truman into the platform for the making of Herzl’s scam. The Anglo-American power, as it came to be shaped in the words of Winston Churchill spoken in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, “the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples”, – i.e. “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States”[32] – has been fully complicit since the San Remo conference of April 1920 to make the Mandate for Palestine into a Jewish state by “emptying” the land gradually of its native Palestinian Arab inhabitants for European Jews by promoting their immigration, assisting in purchase of land and transfer of ownerships, expulsions, wars, and, eventually, after the June 1967 war greenlighting ethnic-cleansing of occupied territories by unlawful annexation up to and including “plausible genocide” according to the provisional ruling in the Order of the International Court of Justice delivered on 26 January 2024.[33]
The Latin phrase, or maxim, Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus meaning “false in one thing, false in everything” was adopted in common law and used in English courts going back to the seventeenth century. This maxim fittingly applies to Herzl’s scam in its entirety from its conception to the present making it one of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century that continues to stain the early decades of the twenty-first. And none other than David Ben Gurion (1886-1973), one of the leaders of the pre-1948 Yishuv or Jewish Agency in the Palestine Mandate and the first prime minister of Israel, confessed in a private conversation how this scam worked and what it meant for Arabs and Jews.
Ben Gurion’s private conversation was recorded by Nahum Goldmann (1895-1982), founder and president of the World Jewish Congress, and published in his memoir The Jewish Paradox. This conversation took place sometime in 1956 at Ben Gurion’s residence in Tel Aviv and Goldmann reported it, as follows:
One day, or rather night, in 1956 I sat up at his house till three in the morning. Our real conversations often used to take place in the kitchen, and as usual he wanted his wife Paula to go to bed. When she insisted on staying, Ben Gurion would tell me: ‘Nahum, you’re the only one she respects. If I ask her she won’t go to bed, but if you ask, she will.’ So I would tell Paula: ‘Just to please me, go to sleep.’ Then Ben Gurion made coffee and sandwiches.
That night, a beautiful summer night, we had a fortright discussion on the Arab problem. ‘I don’t understand your optimism,’ Ben Gurion declared. ‘Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations’ time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it’s simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out.’
I was stunned by this pessimism, but he went on:
‘I’ll be seventy years old soon. Well, Nahum, if you asked me whether I shall die and be buried in a Jewish state I would tell you Yes; in ten years, fifteen years, I believe there will still be a Jewish state. But ask me whether my son Amos, who will be fifty at the end of this year, has a chance of dying and being buried in a Jewish state, and I would answer: fifty-fifty.’
‘But how can you sleep with that prospect in mind,’ I broke in, ‘and be Prime Minister of Israel too?’
‘Who says I sleep?’ he answered simply.[34]
As Ben Gurion confronted his mortality, not unlike Macbeth, he could not wash his hands clean from the deeds done under his command in perpetuating Herzl’s scam. He also could not deny, as he unburdened himself in speaking with Goldmann, who was a suave roving diplomat for the Zionist cause, not only of what he knew was at the core of Arab thinking about the Zionist project but also how the people of the emerging post-colonial Afro-Asian countries saw Israel.
Goldmann recalled the response of Chou En-Lai, the Premier of China, in answer to a question about Zionism asked by a friend on his suggestion. Chou En-Lai said, “Zionism is absurd. If God has promised the Jews a homeland, then let Him give them one, since God is all-powerful. But what has that to do with the Arabs? If the Jews needed a homeland because of Hitler, then let the Germans grant them one of their own provinces, instead of paying them off in millions of marks!”[35] Chou En-Lai’s view on Zionism found a more emphatic expression in the UN General Assembly resolution adopted in November 1975, though later revoked, that “Zionism is racism.” Ben Gurion’s late night confession to Goldmann, as he approached his seventieth birthday, was indicative of his apprehension that the Zionist project over time was likely untenable, while Goldmann also confessed in his memoir that “there is no hope for a Jewish state which has to face another fifty years of struggle against Arab enemies.”[36]
Neither Ben Gurion nor Goldmann could have imagined how greatly changed would be the world in terms of geopolitics and geoeconomics in the half-century since Goldmann published his memoir in 1978. Soviet Union disintegrated, the Cold War ended, the illusion of the American unipolar hegemony lasted for a brief period before displaying the hegemon was skating on very thin ice, the rise of China into becoming the world’s largest economy, the Phoenix-like emergence of Russia as a formidable world power, the coming together of the BRICS nations and with it the birth of a multicentric era in global affairs and the accompanying end of the Eurocentric age, represents not the end of history but its renewal. It also means curtain for the Anglo-American post-1945 construct of world politics and with it the eventual dismantlement of the last colonial-settler apartheid state in the Levant, as a sordid legacy of the age of European imperialism and colonialism.
________________
Notes:
[1] Cited by Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace? (New Brunswick, NJ: North American, Inc., 1978, 1982), p. 7.
[2] Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (London: Penguin Books, 2010), p. 26.
[3] Ibid.,, p. 27.
[4] Amos Elon, Herzl (New York: Jolt, Rinehart and Winston), p. 339.
[5] See “Genocide Convention 1948”:
[6] Salim Mansur, “Theodor Herzl and Pope Pius X: Political Zionism and its war against history.” See:
https://salimmansur.substack.com/p/theodor-herzl-and-pope-pius-x
[7] A.M. Lilienthal, op.cit., p. 15.
[8] See UN Resolution 181 (II) of 29 November 1947:
https://research.un.org/en/docs/ga/quick/regular/2
[9] See the Mandate for Palestine of April 1920:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_for_Palestine
[10] See Jehuda Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 402-407.
[11] See Chaim Weizmann: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/chaim-weizmann
[12] See Louis Brandeis: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/louis-d-brandeis
[13] See Barbara W. Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram: America Enters the War 1917-1918 (New York: Random House, 2014).
[14] John Beaty, The Iron Curtain Over America (Dallas, TX: Wilkinson Publishing Company, 1951; reprint edition October 2016 by The Dot Connector Library, Book 5, see publisher’s website: www.wariscrime.com) pp. 68-69.
[15] See Ron Unz, “Prof. John Beaty and The True Origin of the Jews,” pp. 1-2:
https://www.unz.com/runz/prof-john-beaty-and-the-true-origin-of-the-jews/
[16] See Beaty, p. 69.
[17] David Fromkin, A Peace To End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Avon Books, 1990), pp. 263-275.
[18] Ibid., p. 294.
[19] Ibid.
[20] See: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/montagu-memo-on-british-government-s-anti-semitism
[21] Christopher Sykes, Crossroads to Israel 1947-1948 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 12.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Cited in Sykes, ibid., p. 5.
[24] See the King-Crane Commission:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%E2%80%93Crane_Commission
[25] Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, editors, The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, Fifth Revised and Updated Edition (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1995), pp. 26-27.
[26] Cited in Sykes, ibid., p. 5.
[27] See The Covenant of the League of Nations:
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1919Parisv13/ch10subch1
[28] Ibid.
[29] See Map of the British Mandate of Palestine:
https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine/World-War-I-and-after
[30] See Michael Selzer (editor), Zionism Reconsidered (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970), pp. 19-20.
[31] Ibid., pp. 13-14.
[32] See Winston Churchill’s speech of 5th March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri:
https://uk.usembassy.gov/our-relationship/policy-history/special-relationship-anniversary-1946-2016/
[33] See ICJ’s ORDER of 26 January 2024, para. 54:
https://icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240126-ord-01-00-en.pdf
[34] Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox (New York: Fred Jordan Books/Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), p. 99.
[35] Ibid., p. 198.
[36] Ibid., p. 201.
"the eventual dismantlement of the last colonial-settler apartheid state in the Levant"
Every Muslim state? Let's talk it over in Mecca where every non-Muslim is welcome.
It's all very interesting , Salim, but it still leaves us with the question: what to do?
How do you envision the solution? Kill the Jews? Give them "Jew-Hauls" as suggested by Bill Maher?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP-CRXROorw
History is all fine, but incessant repetition of grievances from both sides will not solve the problems.
Be a MAN, stand up and suggest an answer!
after posting the challenge here:
https://zorkthehun.substack.com/p/the-jewish-question
I offered mine:
https://zorkthehun.substack.com/p/the-jewish-solution