The NEWEST Official Discussion Thread for the creation of Israel, the UN and the British Mandate

[Sixties Fan]

The Mufti’s Long-Lasting Legacy​

From that time to the present, Islamists have asserted that the religion of Islam is an inherently anti-Jewish religion and that this hatred of Judaism and the Jews has everything to do with the classic texts of the Koran and the Hadith.55 As we have seen, in light of the Bludan text, Husseini brought these convictions with him to Berlin in 1941. These beliefs and an uncompromising opposition both to the Allied coalition as well as to Zionism constitute part of the foundation for his collaboration with Hitler. As the archives of the Nazi regime made very clear, not only Hitler, but also officials in the German Foreign Office, the Propaganda Ministry, the SS officials in the Reich Security Main Office and the German military intelligence officers fighting in North Africa were pleased to learn that there was an indigenous form of Islamic, that is, a non-Christian, non-European tradition of hatred of the Jews with apparent theological foundations. For Husseini and the Islamists of the 1930s and 1940s, the secular political battle against Zionism was inseparable from the religious battle against the Jews. Starting from very different cultural and ideological first premises, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism converged at the same time in Bludan, Syria and in Nazi Berlin. Hitler, Himmler and others in the Nazi regime displayed an admiration for what they understood Islam to be, namely a warrior religion, in contrast to pacifist currents in Christianity, and one that shared their animus against their Jews.56

Following World War II, Husseini received a hero’s welcome in Egypt and Palestine, In 1946, Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, called Husseini a “hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle.”57 It was Husseini’s experience fighting the British and his collaboration with Nazism that al-Banna and his fellow members of the Muslim Brotherhood found so inspiring. So did the members of the Arab Higher Committee and the Palestine People’s Party that chose Husseini as their leader in 1945.58 Following the Arab-Palestinian defeat of 1948, Husseini’s political fortunes declined, yet he remained a revered figure in parts of Arab and Palestinian societies. The evidence of his collaboration with the Nazis was either forgotten, ignored or excused as a form of justified anti-colonialism in an alliance of convenience, not shared ideological passion, against a common enemy.

To repeat, the historical importance of Haj Amin al-Husseini did not consist his contribution to the decision to carry out the Holocaust in Europe. Rather it lay in his collaboration with Nazi Germany’s unsuccessful effort to win the war in North Africa and the Middle East and to extend the Holocaust to the Jews of the region. By doing so, he created his most important and longest lasting legacy. It was both by creating some of the canonical texts of the Islamist tradition and in combining elements of European and Islamist Jew-hatred. He thus founded a tradition of absolute and uncompromising rejection of Zionism and later, of the State of Israel. The impact of Husseini the ideologue is as important and as destructive as Husseini the political figure. His own texts before and during the crucial years of exile in Nazi Berlin reveal the real Husseini, the unifier of an extremist but influential interpretation of Islam and its founding texts with the modern secular language of anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism. His target, first and foremost, was the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East, and subsequently, the State of Israel. They were the objects of his greatest hatred and of his considerable political energy. Husseini played a vital role in spreading the falsehood that a Jewish state would be determined somehow to threaten the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust

From 1941 to 1945, al-Husseini played a central role in shaping the political tradition of Islamism. - Jeffrey Herf - JPSR - Jerusalem Center

jcpa.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

Though Haj Amin al-Husseini was not a decision-maker in wartime Berlin, he certainly was in the post-war Middle East. In this regard, Rubin and Schwanitz make a convincing case about his destructive impact on events up to and including the war of 1948. They refer to the impact of Husseini’s charisma, determination to avoid any concessions to the Zionists, ability to incite his followers to violence “as well as internal pressures from Islamist and nationalist radicals who incited flammable public opinion.” While acknowledging pressure from other groups that made war in 1948 seem inevitable, the war of 1948 and the Arab-Israeli conflict may not have taken place “without al-Husaini and his allies…No one individual made this outcome more likely than him…Without al-Husaini’s presence as the Palestinian Arabs’ and [as] a transnational Islamist leader there might have been other options. And al-Husaini was well funded by money and well-armed with rifles that had been provided by the Nazis…Once al-Husaini was allowed to reestablish himself as unchallengeable leader of the Palestine Arabs, this ensured that no compromise such as Partition or the “two-state solution” would be considered, while making certain that Arab leaders would be intimidated and driven to war.”59 We cannot know how events would have transpired if Husseini had been absent in the crucial years before and during the 1948 war. He was, after all, one of a number of Arab leaders who decided on war rather than partition and compromise in 1948. We do know that he was an emphatic opponent of compromise and that he had the means, the arms and the men with which to exert his will in post-war Palestine. The logical outcome of the views he expressed before during and after his collaboration with Nazi Germany, from the Bludan speech of 1937 to the speeches from the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin and the post-war calls for war against the Zionists, was a determination to expel all or most of the Jews living in Mandatory Palestine. This was a policy that could be achieved only by a war to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state.60

One precondition for a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies in an Arab and Palestinian rejection of the reactionary Islamist political theology that Husseini did so much to create. A frank and well-grounded coming to terms with the history of his collaboration with Nazi Germany should be part of that reckoning. In the fall of 2015, Palestinian leaders repeated the falsehood that Israel was threatening the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Those assertions in their own right are evidence of the continuing impact on elements of Palestinian and Arab political culture of the no longer under-examined history of the origins, nature and after-effects of Haj Amin el-Husseini’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust

From 1941 to 1945, al-Husseini played a central role in shaping the political tradition of Islamism. - Jeffrey Herf - JPSR - Jerusalem Center

jcpa.org

 

[Ropey]

Nice to see this thread started by a member.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 1

The Balfour Declaration is important because it recognizes the historical bond of the Jewish People to the Holy Land, a bond which existed long before the declaration. What was significant was its public and formal recognition and its incorporation into international law. In his testimony before the Peel Commission on January 7, 1937, David Ben Gurion drew the distinction between the precedence of the historical facts and their modern recognition:

I say on behalf of the Jews that the Bible is our Mandate, the Bible which was written by us, in our own language, in Hebrew in this very country. That is our Mandate. It is only recognition of this right which was expressed in the Balfour Declaration.6

The Balfour Declaration is a tremendously important document because it contains world recognition of the historical rights of the Jewish People to a National Home. In the Mandate document, it is stated: “Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” Thus, the Mandate and the Balfour Declaration, upon which it was based, did not create Jewish historical rights, but rather recognized a pre-existing right.

The Jewish claim to the Holy Land is based on facts, and we may understand from Chaim Weizmann’s language and choice of words when he explained that it was a major historical event. He called the Balfour Declaration an “act of restitution” and emphatically described it as a “unique act of the world moral conscience.” Expressing his deep awareness of historical continuity over millennia, he called it “the righting of a historical wrong” and an “act of justice.”7

Writing in the 1960s, Sir Isaiah Berlin, stated that, “His [Weizmann’s] name became indissolubly linked with this [the Balfour Declaration], the greatest event in Jewish history since the destruction of Judaea.”8

Further, Jacob, the fourth Lord Rothschild, now 80, and head of the family’s banking dynasty, told former Israeli UK Ambassador Daniel Taub that the declaration of support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine “was the greatest event in Jewish life for thousands of years, a miracle….”9

The practical significance of the Balfour Declaration is that in our times it is the modern basis of the legitimacy of the Jewish National Home and the State of Israel. Winning the Balfour Declaration was a major historical accomplishment, and accordingly the enemies of the Jewish national cause have targeted the Declaration and endeavored to negate it, mainly through a campaign of falsification of history.

Efraim Karsh wrote that

… efforts to undermine the Jewish claim to the Land of Israel date from well before 1967, all the way to the 1920s. People claimed, among other things, that today’s Jews were not the real descendants of the Jewish People but the descendants of the Khuzarim [Khazars]. Likewise, the comparison of the Zionists to Nazis goes all the way back to WWII. At the time when the Nazis were busy exterminating European Jewry, British officials were comparing the Zionists to Nazis.10

The Historical Significance of the Balfour Declaration

The Balfour Declaration is important because it recognizes the historical bond of the Jewish People to the Holy Land, a bond which existed long before the declaration. - Dore Gold

jcpa.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2

The historic Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel is the real claim to statehood. The tendency to justify Zionism on the basis of the Holocaust is totally misconceived. Not only was Zionism a thriving and successful movement prior to this tragedy, but the Holocaust destroyed its largest human reservoir and severely set it back. Moreover, the Arabs have always misrepresented themselves as the Holocaust’s real victims by being supposedly forced to foot the bill for this tragedy. They, moreover, endeavor to undermine Israel’s claim by going back to 1948 and depicting it as a state “born in sin.” The Arabs and their advocates argue that Zionism aspired from its very inception to destroy the Palestinian people, to dispossess them from their patrimony, and took advantage of the opportunity availed by partition and the attendant war.11

The war against the Balfour Declaration included continuous attacks on its legality and the historical bond which it recognized. This assault on Israel’s legitimacy has included the negation of Jewish history in such international bodies as the UN. Recently, it has included the Palestinian Authority’s launching a year of protest against this “crime” and demanding an apology of the British government.

Today’s assault of the Palestinian Arabs on the Balfour Declaration is not new. It has a shameful precedent. On the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1943, Hajj Amin-al Husseini, the former Mufti of Jerusalem and Head of the Moslem Institute in Berlin, addressed the world from Luftwaffe Hall. There, he pledged his unqualified support to the Germans, “who have definitely solved the Jewish problem.”12

On this festive occasion, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop and the Leader of the S.S., Heinrich Himmler, sent telegrams of support. Himmler wrote,

The National Socialist Party has inscribed on its flag ‘the extermination of world Jewry.’ Our party sympathizes with the fight of the Arabs, especially the Arabs of Palestine, against the foreign Jew. Today, on this memorial day of the Balfour Declaration, I send my greetings and wishes for success in your fight.13

The Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine contributed large numbers of volunteers and committed its manpower, agriculture, manufacturing and expertise to the Allied cause. Unfortunately, this contribution was soon forgotten. When the State of Israel was born in 1948, it was invaded by a coalition of Arab armies which received their training and weapons from the main colonial powers in the Middle East at that time: Britain and France. Ironically, the rise of Israel was an anti-colonial development accelerating the demise of European colonial empires and the rise of independent states.

Our understanding of the Balfour Declaration today may be viewed as part of a political war to preserve the integrity of the historical record. In the great historical reckoning which still must take place certain historical facts need to be understood. These would include: 1) the significance of the Balfour Declaration and its standing as a commitment assured by international law; 2) The participation of the Yishuv during the Second World War on the side of the Allied Powers; 3) Great Britain’s dishonorable retreat from the obligations of the Balfour Declaration and its failure to reward its faithful ally.

During the centennial of the Balfour Declaration, our discussion has been tainted by the efforts of Israel’s enemies to misrepresent and falsify the historical facts. They try to portray modern Israel as a product of European colonialism, plain and simple, with no roots in the land and no historical rights. It is not possible to accept the myths and falsehoods of a so-called “narrative,” which supposedly can outweigh the historical facts. In simple language, modern Israel is the heir and successor to ancient Israel. The Balfour Declaration recognized this bond and in doing so showed the world “a unique act of world moral conscience.”


(full article online)

The Historical Significance of the Balfour Declaration

The Balfour Declaration is important because it recognizes the historical bond of the Jewish People to the Holy Land, a bond which existed long before the declaration. - Dore Gold

jcpa.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

For 100 years the British statement, which inaugurated Zionism’s legitimation in the eyes of the world, has been seen as the isolated act of a single nation. The truth is much different.

June 5, 2017 | Martin Kramer

On November 2, 1917, a century ago, Arthur James Balfour, the British foreign secretary, conveyed the following pledge in a public letter to a prominent British Zionist, Lord Walter Rothschild:

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, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

At the time, as World War I raged, British and Australian forces were fighting deep in Palestine against the Ottomans, and were poised to take Jerusalem.

The Balfour Declaration, for all its vagaries, constituted the first step toward the objective of political Zionism as outlined by the First Zionist Congress at its meeting in Basle, Switzerland in 1897: “Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law.” Theodor Herzl had failed to land such a commitment, either from the Ottoman sultan or from any of Europe’s potentates. The declaration was the much-awaited opening: narrow, conditional, hedged, but an opening all the same.
“There is a British proverb about the camel and the tent,” said the British Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann later that November. “At first the camel sticks one leg in the tent, and eventually it
slips into it. This must be our policy.” And so it became.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

 

[Sixties Fan]

I. The Debate Over the Declaration’s Meaning
Since the Balfour Declaration constitutes the beginning of Israel’s legitimation by other nations, the declaration’s own legitimacy has been the subject of unending attacks. This is made easier with each passing year, as the world that produced the declaration draws ever more remote. Few people today are sure why World War I was fought at all, and Britain circa 1917 is best known through PBS costume dramas along the lines of Downton Abbey. The Balfour Declaration? In the mind’s eye, one imagines back-and-forth negotiations in the palaces of Whitehall and the gilded drawing rooms of the Rothschild dynasty, with white-gloved servants delivering urgent sealed missives. Surely the declaration was stirred by similarly antique passions and interests, from safeguarding England’s route to India to satisfying the Christian Restorationist imperative of returning the Jews to the Holy Land.

The content of the declaration seems no less distant or downright baffling. The prominent Jewish intellectual Arthur Koestler, repeating a frequent mantra, would call it “one the most improbable political documents of all time,” in which “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.” The fact that it included no explicit rationale for itself has also fueled the suspicion that its authors had dark or disreputable motives. After all, it was issued in the name of the largest empire in history, embracing (or, perhaps, gripping) almost a quarter of the world’s landmass and population. In the guilt-sodden litany of imperialism at its apogee, the Balfour Declaration has enjoyed a certain preeminence as (in the words of the British Arabist Elizabeth Monroe) “one of the greatest mistakes in our imperial history.”

The content of the Balfour Declaration seems distant or downright baffling. The prominent Jewish intellectual Arthur Koestler, repeating a frequent mantra, called it “one the most improbable political documents of all time.”
The whiff of old-style imperialism also explains why some Israelis and supporters of Israel have tended to downplay the Balfour Declaration’s significance. Some have tried to shift the focus to the League of Nations mandate for Palestine, conferred on Britain in 1922, which not only incorporated the declaration but helpfully added a rationale: it was “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” that formed “grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” Sixty years ago, the American lawyer Sol Linowitz insisted that by itself the declaration was “legally impotent. For Great Britain had no sovereign rights over Palestine; it had no proprietary interest; it had no authority to dispose of the land.” It was only in the League of Nations mandate that “the victorious Allies in solemn proclamation recognized the prior
Jewish rights to Palestine,” and did so in “a formal international document of unquestionable legal validity.”

Another approach to downplaying the Balfour Declaration has been to skip straight to the 1947 UN General Assembly resolution endorsing the partition of Palestine into two states. An example is a recent article by Galia Golan, a distinguished Hebrew University professor, headlined “Balfour Just Isn’t That Big a Deal.” Her argument: the declaration was merely the pronouncement of a “colonial power,” whereas the 1947 resolution constituted “international legitimacy,” conferred by “the international community as represented by the United Nations.”

It is interesting, then, that the late Abba Eban, even though he played a major role in securing the 1947 resolution, thought otherwise. The events of 1947 and 1948, he wrote, “seemed to overshadow the Balfour Declaration” and “to have more revolutionary consequences.” But in fact, by 1947 the Zionists could not be stopped: the Yishuv was “too large to be dominated by Arabs, too self-reliant to be confined by tutelage, and too ferociously resistant to be thwarted in its main ambition” of statehood. In 1917, by contrast, proposing the recognition of the right of the Jews to a “national home” in Palestine “was to rebel against the inertia of established facts” and against “mountainous obstacles of rationality.” In Eban’s view, the Balfour Declaration thus stands alone as “the decisive diplomatic victory of the Jewish people in modern history.”

And so indeed it has largely been taken. The declaration has come to be remembered as either the moment of conception for Israel (and what the pro-Zionist parliamentarian Richard Crossman called “one of the greatest acts of Western statesmanship in the 20th century”) or the original sin against the Palestinian Arabs (and what the Palestinian scholar-activist Walid Khalidi recently called “the single most destructive political document on the Middle East in the 20th century”). In this sense, the declaration’s centennial is truly “a big deal.” According to various announcements, come November, it will be celebrated by Israel, protested by the Palestinians, and “marked” by Britain.

Few of the celebrants or the protesters, however, will have much understanding of what produced the Balfour Declaration—which should not be surprising. Even historians cannot agree, which assures that almost no one who hasn’t studied the history of it is likely to have a clue.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

 

[Sixties Fan]

From Times of Israel:

Far-right lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich said Sunday that the Palestinian people were “an invention” from the past century and that people like himself and his grandparents were the “real Palestinians.”

Speaking in Paris... Smotrich said there was “no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as the Palestinian people,” a comment that was met with applause and cheers from attendees, as seen in a video from the event posted online.

“Do you know who are the Palestinians?” asked the head of the ultranationalist Religious Zionism party and Israel’s finance minister. “I’m Palestinian,” he said, also mentioning his grandmother who was born in the northern Israeli town of Metula 100 years ago, and his grandfather, a 13th-generation Jerusalemite as the “real Palestinians.”

We've discussed this topic many times before, and Smotrich is correct. Palestinian identity is a response to Zionism. Palestinian "culture" is a modern invention, and one that is explicitly political.

Here's an Ottoman map of the region from a 1913 work "Jughrafiya-i Osmani" that doesn't even say Palestine.


Even though there was no subdistrict of the Ottoman Empire known as "Palestine," one would expect every map to at least mention it if it was so important.

But there is another piece of evidence that shows that there was no historic Palestinian people - and that is their surnames.

Even among Palestinians, you can see lots of surnames that show where they originated - al-Masri from Egypt, al-Sham from Syria, al-Hindi from India, al-Mughrabi from Morocco, al-Turki, al-Yamani, and dozens of others.

Have you ever heard of anyone with the name al-Filastini?

I think I may have seen it once or twice, but it is exceedingly rare. Looking through Facebook, I see lots of people who claim that name but they all seem to be pseudonyms - I couldn't find one who listed a relative with the same name. I certainly cannot find anyone with that name in old newspapers or books.

This indicates that even as Arabs would happily take on the names of the cities or even regions they were from (like al-Haurani from the Hauran region of Syria) essentially no one ever thought of themselves as "Palestinian." Nabulsi from Nablus, sure - but Filastini? Essentially no one.

No one can rewrite the history of their family surnames. And when we see so many Arabic surnames that proudly describe where they came from, and practically none say "Filastini," you know that nearly none identified as Palestinian.

Smotrich is right - there were no Arabs who identified as Palestinian a century ago (update: few)

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Chaim Weizmann’s Forgotten Partners

The various views of Britain’s motives need only be summarized here.

In 1916 and 1917, the Allied powers (Britain, France, Belgium, Russia, Italy, and later the United States) were locked in a devastating war with the Central powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire) and fearful that they might be fought to a draw. Hence the most documented explanation for the declaration is that the British government hoped to persuade Jews in two wavering Allied countries, the United States and Russia, to insist that their
governments stay in the war until total victory. Jewish influence, the British thought, would tilt the debate in Washington and St. Petersburg and could best be activated by the promise of a Jewish restoration to Palestine. This was married to a (misplaced) fear that Germany might steal a march on the Allies by issuing its own pro-Zionist declaration.

To us today, this seems like a vast exaggeration of the power of Jews at the time. But British policymakers believed in what the British Zionist Harry Sacher once called “the great Jewish legend”:
That legend finds its crudest and its stupidest expression in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion [wrote Sacher], but many even of those who reject a forgery and a lie have a residual belief in the power and the unity of Jewry. We suffer for it, but it is not wholly without its compensations. It is one of the imponderabilia of politics, and it plays, consciously or unconsciously, its part in the calculations and the decisions of statesmen.

The second explanation is that the British rushed to embrace Zionism as a means of justifying their own claim to Palestine in the anticipated postwar carve-up of the Middle East. The British, as patrons of the Jews, could exclude their French ally from Palestine while claiming to champion the “self-determination” of a small people. While this explanation differs from the first, it shares with it a straightforward assumption: needing Zionism for their own ends, the British required very little prodding to produce the Balfour Declaration.

But in the collective memory of Zionists and Israelis, there is another factor: the persuasive genius of one man, Chaim Weizmann. That telling goes like this: Weizmann, famed biochemist and later head of the English Zionist Federation, managed single-handedly to win over Britain’s leading politicians and opinion-makers to the Zionist idea. The Weizmann saga unfolds behind the scenes in London drawing rooms, where this Russian Jewish immigrant, having arrived in England only in 1904, succeeds in persuading—some might say, seducing—the likes of Balfour, Mark Sykes, Alfred Milner, and David Lloyd George, who would soon hold the fate of the Middle East in their hands. The Balfour Declaration is the triumph of one man’s indefatigable will, and his personal effect upon a handful of British statesmen.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, as early as January 1918, cast Weizmann in this heroic role:
The declaration is the personal achievement of one man alone: Dr. Chaim Weizmann. Four years of patient and calculated work established the link between us and each one of the statesmen in this country. The important people of England speak openly of his personal charm as one of the most effective factors in Zionist propaganda in England. The endorsement of Zionism by most of the Rothschilds in London is also due to his influence. . . . In our history, the declaration will remain linked to the name of Weizmann.

In the decades that followed the Balfour Declaration, Weizmann would go on to a famed career as a leader, spokesman, and diplomat of Zionism, culminating in his election as Israel’s first president. In 1949, he published his autobiography, Trial and Error, translated over the next two
years into Hebrew, German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Spanish, Italian, and a few years later French. This work firmly cemented his place in the Zionist pantheon as the man who brought forth the declaration. He died in 1952; when, in 1967, Israel celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, it issued two stamps, one depicting Balfour, the other, Weizmann.

True, when one consults the website of Yad Weizmann, the institute that houses his archives, one discovers that Weizmann was not alone: “there were additional partners in this success.” Still, “the achievement is generally identified with Chaim Weizmann, who quickly became the prominent Zionist leader of his generation.”

When the fuller story is told, the Balfour Declaration looks very different. It is no longer a British imperial grab but the outcome of a carefully constructed consensus of the leading democracies of the day.

Who were these “additional partners”? Their contribution has been largely forgotten. But when the fuller story is told, the Balfour Declaration looks very different. It is no longer a British imperial grab but the outcome of a carefully constructed consensus of the leading democracies of the day. It is no longer in tension with the principle of self-determination, but a statement made possible by the very champion of the principle. And it is no longer an emanation of secret dealings but one of the first instances of public diplomacy. It is, in short, not a throwback to the 19th century but an opening to the 20th.

The key to understanding the fuller story is this: in regard to Palestine, Britain could not have acted alone, because it belonged to an alliance. The Allied powers, especially Britain and France but also Russia, Italy, and later America, were fighting together. Their policies had to be coordinated. It would have been unthinkable for Britain to have issued a public pledge regarding the future of territory yet to be taken in war without the prior assent of its wartime allies— especially those that also had an interest in Palestine.

This fact is entirely obscured by the Balfour Declaration’s form. The letter was written on behalf of His Majesty’s government and no other. The declaration was approved by the British cabinet and no other. It was signed by the British foreign secretary and no other. On the face of it, the declaration was a unilateral British letter of intent. In truth, in expressing a broad consensus of the Allies, it might even be seen as roughly comparable to a UN Security Council resolution today.

To appreciate this, it is necessary to shift the focus away from London to Paris, Rome, and Washington; and away from Chaim Weizmann to a Zionist leader now barely remembered: Nahum Sokolow.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

 

[Sixties Fan]

Enter Nahum Sokolow

Nahum Sokolow? Most Israelis know a Sokolow Street—several older Israeli cities have one. Fewer can locate Beit Sokolow, the headquarters of the Israeli Journalists’ Association in Tel Aviv, or know of the biennial Sokolow Prize, a journalism award. Scarcely anyone is aware that Sde Naḥum, a small kibbutz in the Beit She’an valley, is named after him.

But as this short list suggests, Sokolow has been almost entirely forgotten. Unlike Weizmann, no institute or memorial bears his name, no currency or stamp bears his image. He is buried on Mount Herzl, where he was reinterred in 1956, two decades after his death. Even then, an Israeli newspaper reported that “those born in Israel and the new immigrants who encountered the funeral processions, asked: ‘Who is this Nahum Sokolow?’” Today, more than 80 years after his death, only a few historians remember Sokolow, and none has troubled to produce a scholarly biography.
Who then was he? Nahum Sokolow was born sometime between 1859 and 1861 in central Poland and received a traditional rabbinic schooling. But he taught himself secular subjects and soon gained renown as a prodigy, a polyglot, and a prolific writer on a vast array of subjects. In 1880 he moved to Warsaw and later assumed the editorship of the Hebrew journal Hatsefirah, which became a daily in 1886. There he contributed a popular column and wrote much of the rest of the paper, so that his fame spread with the spread of modern Hebrew. He was soon acknowledged as the world’s most prominent Hebrew-language journalist.

In 1897, Sokolow reported from the First Zionist Congress and fell under the spell of Herzl. It was he who translated Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland into Hebrew and who gave it the Hebrew title Tel Aviv, which a few years later became the name of a new Jewish city. Leaving daily journalism in 1906, he became the secretary general of the World Zionist Organization, which was struggling after the death of Herzl two years earlier.

Sokolow is the entry point into the fuller story of the Balfour Declaration. Indeed, at the time of the declaration, many Jews around the world gave him more credit for it than they gave to Weizmann.

Sokolow thereupon threw himself into lobbying, diplomacy, and propaganda, traveling across Europe, America, and the Ottoman Empire. In 1911, he was elected to the Zionist Executive; in 1914, following the outbreak of war, he relocated to Britain, where he joined forces with the dynamic young Chaim Weizmann in the campaign to win British recognition for Zionist aims.

Sokolow is the entry point into the fuller story of the Balfour Declaration. Indeed, at the time of the declaration, many Jews around the world gave him more credit for it than they gave to Weizmann. This was partly because Sokolow the Hebrew journalist was better known than Weizmann the biochemist. As Herzl’s contemporary, he was also senior to Weizmann in age and in his standing in world Zionism.
But Sokolow was also given credit because he accomplished what many thought impossible: during the spring of 1917, he secured the explicit or tacit assent of the French and Italian governments, and even of the Catholic pope, to a Jewish “national home” under British auspices.
How did he surprise everyone, including Weizmann, by his achievement? Why has it been forgotten? And how might its recovery benefit the centennial retrospective on the Balfour Declaration?

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

 

[Sixties Fan]

The Alqasem family: a perfect example of Arab colonialists who pretend to be anticolonialist​

One of the people who tried to troll me recently is Karen Alqasem, an American whose daughter Lara who made headline a few years ago for being briefly blocked from studying at Hebrew University for her BDS activities. Her father is a raging antisemite, Karen supports murdering Jews and then tried to lecture me on morality.

For fun, I looked at Karen's recent tweets, and this one caught my eye:



Well, since she claims that the Al Qasem family has more history in the land than the Jews, I decided to look up their family tree.

Multiple accounts of their family history are most intriguing.

Of course, the Al Qasems don't originate in the Levant.

Everyone agrees that they began as a tribe in Arabia. They then spread all over, and today you can find them from Morocco to Lebanon to Syria and Bahrain.

But they didn't just spread - they conquered.

The Al Qasem tribe was instrumental in the Arab conquest of the Levant, Egypt and North Africa/Maghreb.

They were colonialists!

The Qasems helped lead the colonial Muslim Arab conquests of non-Arab territories and turned them into Arab regions.

But their family history articles claim, incredibly, that they fought against colonialism! "Individuals and groups associated with the Al-Qasim family participated in the struggle against colonialism and the conquest of Egypt, the Levant and Morocco," says their family biography.

Talk about projection! She is claiming that Jews are the colonialists, when the truth is that the Al Qasem family are the paradigms of colonialism!

And what about Karen herself, who married into the Alqasem family and now claims to have more history in Israel than someone whose family lived in Hebron for centuries?

Oh, she's Welsh.

Yes - she really is a white European who pretends to be indigenous to the Middle East while claiming Jews who have lived there and kept a connection to the Land for millennia are the white European colonizers.

You can't make this up.

The Alqasem family: a perfect example of Arab colonialists who pretend to be anticolonialist

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Palestinians are Philistines, Canaanites, Jebusites, Arabs, and now Philistines again!​

Ibrahim Abrash, writing in Palestinian news site Amad, says that Bezalel Smotrich is ignoring the Jewish Scripture when he says there were no such thing as the Palestinian people.

Because look at the many times that the Torah mentions Philistines and the Land of the Philistines!

It's been a while since Palestinians claimed to be Philistines. It was a common claim at the UN in the 1940s, when the Syrian representative stated, "The Palestinian Arabs are the descendants of the same inhabitants of that country of forty centuries ago who fought in the first campaign which the Jews waged against Palestine in the fifteenth century before Christ. In the Bible, they are called the Philistines. After about the thirteenth century, they adopted the Arabic language, which was later replaced by the Syrian language, a language closely related to the former. These people have not changed. They are the same people who were living there then. They have been there for forty centuries--since prehistoric times."

(Note his backhanded way of saying that Palestine is really a part of Greater Syria.)

The claim that Palestinians were Syrians became less popular as the term "philistine" in English is equated with narrow-mindedness and being uncultured.

The obvious next move was for Palestinians to claim to be Canaanites, because that way they can say that the Jews ethically cleansed them twice, and Canaanites were definitely in the bulk of the Land of Israel before the Jews.

But when Jerusalem became an issue, Palestinians suddenly became Jebusites, a people who have no independent known history outside the Torah. But they lived around Jerusalem, so therefore Palestinians must have been Jebusites.

Of course, the same Bible that says Jebusites existed says that they legally sold Jerusalem to King David.

Notice that there is never the slightest bit of historical, scientific, linguistic or cultural evidence for these contradictory and supposedly unbroken histories of Palestinians.

So now we are back to Philistines, since that is the most convenient lie for the current threat.

Any lie will do, as long as they counter Jews' claims.

Which reminds me of a recent comic of mine:

Palestinians are Philistines, Canaanites, Jebusites, Arabs, and now Philistines again!

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

UPDATE: I should say "few." Zachary Foster has traced the beginnings of the term Palestinians to refer to the Arabs of Palestine in Arabic and he finds they began at the turn of the twentieth century, largely but not only as a response to Zionism. (h/.t Yoel)

Smotrich is right - there were no Arabs who identified as Palestinian a century ago (update: few)

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Britain as a Repository of Zionist Hopes
In early 1917, the Zionists had one objective. There was no doubt that the best prospects for Zionism lay in a total Allied victory over the German-backed Ottomans and the placing of Palestine under an exclusively British protectorate. Only in Britain did Zionism have sufficient support in governing circles to overcome deep-seated opposition from critics and doubters across Europe, including among influential Jews opposed to Zionism. And only Britain had the mix of strategic interests, military power, and political will to enforce its writ in Palestine.

The Zionists faced two problems. The first: Britain had already promised to share Palestine with its wartime allies. The second: the Zionists didn’t know it.

In the spring of 1916, Britain, France, and Russia had finalized a secret agreement to partition the Ottoman empire upon its eventual defeat. This was the “Asia Minor Agreement,” commonly known as the Sykes-Picot accord after the British negotiator Sir Mark Sykes and his French counterpart, the diplomat François Georges-Picot. The agreement divided the Levant and Mesopotamia between Britain and France, along an east-west “line in the sand” from the Mediterranean to the western border of Persia. (Russia was to receive a large swath of eastern Anatolia.)

But Palestine involved so many conflicting interests that it needed a special status. According to the Sykes-Picot map, the northern Galilee would to go to France; the ports at Haifa and Acre would be allotted to Britain; and the center of the country, including Jerusalem and Jaffa, was to come under “an international administration the form of which is to be decided upon” through consultation with all of the Allies, who also included Italy and Tsarist Russia. If the Sykes-Picot agreement had been implemented, it might well have destroyed the prospects of Zionism. Weizmann later described it as “fatal to us.”

Fortunately for the Zionists, David Lloyd George, who became prime minister at the close of 1916, thought that the Sykes-Picot agreement had given too large a place in Palestine to the French. Britain, after all, would do nearly all of the expected fighting and dying against Ottoman forces in the Sinai and Palestine. So Sykes was tasked with revising the Palestine portion of the Sykes-
Picot accord in such a way as to leave Britain with the lion’s share. The French, represented by Picot, resisted, insisting that their own claim to Palestine was at least equal to Britain’s.
It was at this moment that Sykes “discovered” Zionism. “It seems at first a strange enough story,” Sokolow later wrote. “A certain Sir Mark appears, he makes some inquiries, and then expresses a wish to meet the Zionist leaders. Finally a meeting actually takes place and discussions are entered upon.” That meeting took place on the morning of February 7, 1917, at a private home in London. Sykes there met the foremost leaders and sympathizers of the Zionist movement: Sokolow, Weizmann, Lord Walter Rothschild, James de Rothschild, and Herbert Samuel. From the record of that meeting, it is clear that Sykes held out the prospect that Britain might grant the Zionists some form of recognition—on condition.
“France,” he told them, “was the serious difficulty. . . . The French wanted all Syria and [a] great say in Palestine.” Sykes proposed that the Zionists approach Picot in order to “put the Jewish views” before him and “convince” the French. Some of the Zionists in the room resisted the idea, arguing that Britain should do the work, but Sykes thought otherwise. James de Rothschild finally replied that Sokolow was “the proper person” who could “speak for the Russian Jews also.” Sykes agreed to introduce Sokolow to Picot the following day.

Why was Sokolow “the proper person”? Harry Sacher, a protégé of Weizmann who was present at the London meeting, later characterized Sokolow’s advantages:
Sokolow was the diplomatist of the Zionist movement, the diplomatist of the school of the Quai d’Orsay [the French foreign ministry]. His handsome appearance, his air of fine breeding, his distinguished manner, his gentle speech, his calculated expression, his cautious action, his well-cut clothes, his monocle, were faithful to a tradition which perhaps is not so highly honored as before the war. . . . Diplomats and ministers felt that he belonged to their club, spoke their language, and was one of themselves. He practiced their art and was entitled to their privileges.

Sokolow made the impression of a statesman, albeit one without a state, and this went beyond his prodigious mastery of European languages. One admirer attributed his diplomatic finesse to his being “a European through and through, internally as well as externally, in his Weltanschauung and manners. . . . He shined in the presence of Woodrow Wilson, Paul Painlevé, George Clemenceau, and Arthur James Balfour.”
And while Sokolow represented no state, Europe’s leaders saw in “this little bent Jew,” still bearing Russian nationality, an authentic spokesman of the Jewish masses of Russia and Poland, who could move them in the desired direction by the power of his words. He seemed to personify what Sacher called “the great Jewish legend,” as a cosmopolitan leader of the “great Jewry” to which Sykes and others attributed a vast, subterranean influence.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

 

[P F Tinmore]

I. The Debate Over the Declaration’s Meaning
Since the Balfour Declaration constitutes the beginning of Israel’s legitimation by other nations, the declaration’s own legitimacy has been the subject of unending attacks. This is made easier with each passing year, as the world that produced the declaration draws ever more remote. Few people today are sure why World War I was fought at all, and Britain circa 1917 is best known through PBS costume dramas along the lines of Downton Abbey. The Balfour Declaration? In the mind’s eye, one imagines back-and-forth negotiations in the palaces of Whitehall and the gilded drawing rooms of the Rothschild dynasty, with white-gloved servants delivering urgent sealed missives. Surely the declaration was stirred by similarly antique passions and interests, from safeguarding England’s route to India to satisfying the Christian Restorationist imperative of returning the Jews to the Holy Land.

The content of the declaration seems no less distant or downright baffling. The prominent Jewish intellectual Arthur Koestler, repeating a frequent mantra, would call it “one the most improbable political documents of all time,” in which “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.” The fact that it included no explicit rationale for itself has also fueled the suspicion that its authors had dark or disreputable motives. After all, it was issued in the name of the largest empire in history, embracing (or, perhaps, gripping) almost a quarter of the world’s landmass and population. In the guilt-sodden litany of imperialism at its apogee, the Balfour Declaration has enjoyed a certain preeminence as (in the words of the British Arabist Elizabeth Monroe) “one of the greatest mistakes in our imperial history.”

The content of the Balfour Declaration seems distant or downright baffling. The prominent Jewish intellectual Arthur Koestler, repeating a frequent mantra, called it “one the most improbable political documents of all time.”
The whiff of old-style imperialism also explains why some Israelis and supporters of Israel have tended to downplay the Balfour Declaration’s significance. Some have tried to shift the focus to the League of Nations mandate for Palestine, conferred on Britain in 1922, which not only incorporated the declaration but helpfully added a rationale: it was “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” that formed “grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” Sixty years ago, the American lawyer Sol Linowitz insisted that by itself the declaration was “legally impotent. For Great Britain had no sovereign rights over Palestine; it had no proprietary interest; it had no authority to dispose of the land.” It was only in the League of Nations mandate that “the victorious Allies in solemn proclamation recognized the prior
Jewish rights to Palestine,” and did so in “a formal international document of unquestionable legal validity.”

Another approach to downplaying the Balfour Declaration has been to skip straight to the 1947 UN General Assembly resolution endorsing the partition of Palestine into two states. An example is a recent article by Galia Golan, a distinguished Hebrew University professor, headlined “Balfour Just Isn’t That Big a Deal.” Her argument: the declaration was merely the pronouncement of a “colonial power,” whereas the 1947 resolution constituted “international legitimacy,” conferred by “the international community as represented by the United Nations.”

It is interesting, then, that the late Abba Eban, even though he played a major role in securing the 1947 resolution, thought otherwise. The events of 1947 and 1948, he wrote, “seemed to overshadow the Balfour Declaration” and “to have more revolutionary consequences.” But in fact, by 1947 the Zionists could not be stopped: the Yishuv was “too large to be dominated by Arabs, too self-reliant to be confined by tutelage, and too ferociously resistant to be thwarted in its main ambition” of statehood. In 1917, by contrast, proposing the recognition of the right of the Jews to a “national home” in Palestine “was to rebel against the inertia of established facts” and against “mountainous obstacles of rationality.” In Eban’s view, the Balfour Declaration thus stands alone as “the decisive diplomatic victory of the Jewish people in modern history.”

And so indeed it has largely been taken. The declaration has come to be remembered as either the moment of conception for Israel (and what the pro-Zionist parliamentarian Richard Crossman called “one of the greatest acts of Western statesmanship in the 20th century”) or the original sin against the Palestinian Arabs (and what the Palestinian scholar-activist Walid Khalidi recently called “the single most destructive political document on the Middle East in the 20th century”). In this sense, the declaration’s centennial is truly “a big deal.” According to various announcements, come November, it will be celebrated by Israel, protested by the Palestinians, and “marked” by Britain.

Few of the celebrants or the protesters, however, will have much understanding of what produced the Balfour Declaration—which should not be surprising. Even historians cannot agree, which assures that almost no one who hasn’t studied the history of it is likely to have a clue.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

would call it “one the most improbable political documents of all time,” in which “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”

Sixty years ago, the American lawyer Sol Linowitz insisted that by itself the declaration was “legally impotent. For Great Britain had no sovereign rights over Palestine; it had no proprietary interest; it had no authority to dispose of the land.”

“Balfour Just Isn’t That Big a Deal.” Her argument: the declaration was merely the pronouncement of a “colonial power,”

Why did the Zionists accept part of Palestine in 1947 when they received the whole pie 30 years earlier?

 

[Sixties Fan]

According to Arab interpretations of international law in 1930, Jews have the sole right to the Temple Mount today!​

Kotel, circa 1920

According to Palestinian media, the League of Arab States declared that the 1930 international commission that declared that Muslims had legal ownership of the Western Wall is still true, and the Western Wall - as well as the plaza in front of it - is all Muslim Waqf land where Jews have no legal rights.

While US and European leaders have fallen over themselves to condemn Bezalel Smotrich for saying that the Palestinian people are a recent invention, saying that statements like that are inflammatory, there is silence in both diplomatic circles and the media about the Arabs denying any rights of Jews to the very place that they have prayed towards for thousands of years.

Selective outrage is the norm, of course. Arabs are expected to say inflammatory, inciting and false statements - they do this every day - but only Jews are expected to speak in measured tones and not to plainly state the truth if it might upset the touchy Arabs.

But there is a very interesting angle to the newfound Palestinian love of the 1930 Western Wall Commission report. (They made it clear at the time that they do not accept that the Commission has any legal right to rule on the issue.)

If you look closer at the specific Muslim claims in 1930 quoted in the Commission report, you find out that according to their logic at the time, Israel is the legal owner today not only of the Kotel but of all of Jerusalem.

The Muslim side, represented by Ahmed Zaki Pasha, declared the Muslim legal case to the Commission:

History shows that after having acquired Palestine by the right of conquest, the Jews were definitely driven out of the country by the Romans after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. The Christians then ruled the country until the Arab conquest under Omar. With the exception of 90 years during the epoch of the Crusades the effective possession of the country has been in the hands of the Arabs from generation to generation. The Jews who came to Palestine were not interfered with by the Arabs and were fairly well treated by the Moslem rulers of the country. During this long period there were no incidents at the Buraq. The Jews never claimed any rights to the Wall and were content to go now and them to lament at that place, contented in the assurance that the tolerant Arabs would not interfere with them. It is the Balfour Declaration, reiterated in the Terms of the Mandate, that has been the cause of the discussion which finally brought bloodshed over Palestine and incited the Jews to urge claims which they had never thought of before. The creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, an Arab country, lost for ever by the Jews hundreds and hundreds of years ago, can only give rise to perpetual troubles and dissensions. The country which the Jews had taken over by right of conquest was again lost, and the Arabs in their turn conquered it, not from the Jews, who had been driven out of Palestine several centuries before, but from the Byzantines. It was not a Jewish kingdom that the Arabs occupied in the 7th century, but a country to which the Jews had no right whatever.

It is here a question about property which has belonged to the Moslems for many centuries.

The Arab side is saying explicitly that the way that land in Palestine changes legal ownership is by the right of conquest. They admit that Jews owned the land before any Arabs did, legally, by conquering it. Then the Romans, Byzantines and finally Muslims had legal ownership because of their subsequent conquests. And even the Muslim ownership of the Temple Mount and Western Wall had only been for "many centuries" because of the Muslim conquest of the land.

Since then, of course, the Jews re-conquered the land of Israel. And therefore, according to the Muslim's own testimony to this commission that they now say has legal weight, Jews have complete ownership of all of Jerusalem today, having conquered the city in 1967.

This is not the only part of the Muslim claims from 1930 that undermine their claim today.

One is that the 1930 claims admitted that the original holiness of the Temple Mount came from the Temples themselves, which today's Palestinian deny ever existed:

It ought to be observed that when Mohammed came to Jerusalem, the site of the ancient Temple, which was already an object of veneration for the Moslems, was called Masdjed Al Aqsa (i.e., remote oratory) in contrast to the Mosque of Mecca or Masdjed Al Haram (i.e., oratory, sanctuary). At that time Mecca was hostile to Mohammed. Owing to that, Jerusalem and especially the Temple area, for a certain period, became the first Kibla (direction) for the Moslems, i.e., during that period they turned their faces in the direction of Jerusalem when praying and it was not till later on that Mecca became definitely the Kibla.

Another most interesting section notes that according to Sharia law, once land is declared sacred Waqf land, it cannot lose that status - except for one case:

A Waqf property cannot be acquired by usucaption unless the usucaptor has enjoyed a peaceful and uninterrupted possession ab antique, i.e., for at least 33 years.

Israel has certainly had unquestioned possession of the Kotel since 1967, and arguably all of Jerusalem. (This is probably a very weak argument under Sharia; I imagine any dispute by the previous owner would make usucaption invalid, but it is a fun argument.)

Perhaps the Palestinians shouldn't be so quick to embrace the 1930 international commission report. It shows that the same Muslim legal reasonings that sounded good to them in 1930 can now be used against them.

According to Arab interpretations of international law in 1930, Jews have the sole right to the Temple Mount today!

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

V. Sokolow Goes Forth


And so Sokolow went forth—first to engage with Picot in London, then back and forth to Paris, with an unexpected detour to Rome, all in close coordination with Sykes. It was a daunting mission. Sokolow’s task was to persuade the French not just of the feasibility of the Zionist project but also of the virtues of a British protectorate over Palestine. On the face of it, both propositions should have seemed preposterous to the French. Zionism enjoyed little support among French Jews, and the French had already been promised a share of Palestine equal to Britain’s in the Sykes-Picot accord (the details of which Sykes had kept secret from Sokolow and Weizmann).
Yet Sokolow managed not only to disarm suspicion of the Zionist program; he even succeeded in extracting statements of support. Most books on the Balfour Declaration do devote a chapter to the story. (Prime instances: Leonard Stein: “Sokolow in Paris and Rome.” Isaiah Friedman: “Achievements in Paris and Rome.” Ronald Sanders: “Sykes and Sokolow in Paris and Rome.” Jonathan Schneer: “Sokolow in France and Italy.”) With a nod of acknowledgment to them all (and apologies for some simplification), here is a quick summation of Sokolow’s achievements.

After two preparatory meetings with Picot in London, Sokolow headed for Paris. In two separate rounds of talks (punctuated by a trip to Rome), he thrice met Jules Cambon, secretary-general of the foreign ministry and one of the great French diplomats of the day, and the second time around had an audience with Prime Minister Alexandre Ribot. To Picot in London, Sokolow had expressed an open preference for British protection, and Picot pushed back. So in Paris he instead emphasized the feasibility of the Zionist project and how it animated Jewish opinion in Russia and America.

Two leading historians of French policy, Christopher Andrew and A.S. Kanya-Forstner, described this revised approach as “more diplomatic, more conciliatory, and more misleading.” The French expressed a general sympathy for Zionism, but Sokolow then had the bold temerity to ask for it in writing. And he received it. On June 4, 1917, Cambon issued him a letter (on the prime minister’s authority), which not only anticipated the Balfour Declaration but cleared the way for it.

The French expressed a general sympathy for Zionism, but Sokolow had the temerity to ask for it in writing. And he received it. On June 4, 1917, they issued him a letter that not only anticipated the Balfour Declaration but cleared the way for it.

The Cambon letter, almost as forgotten as Sokolow, was addressed to him and is worth quoting in full:

You were good enough to present the project to which you are devoting your efforts, which has for its object the development of Jewish colonization in Palestine. You consider that, circumstances permitting, and the independence of the Holy Places being safeguarded on the other hand, it would be a deed of justice and of reparation to assist, by the protection of the Allied Powers, in the renaissance of the Jewish
nationality [nationalité juive] in that land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago.

The French government, which entered this present war to defend a people wrongly attacked, and which continues the struggle to assure the victory of right over might, can but feel sympathy for your cause, the triumph of which is bound up with that of the Allies.

I am happy to give you herewith such assurance.
As Weizmann’s biographer Jehuda Reinharz has noted, the Cambon letter “in content and form was much more favorable to the Zionists than the watered-down formula of the Balfour Declaration” that followed it. The French accepted a rationale in terms of “justice” and “reparation,” and acknowledged the historical Jewish tie to the land. The letter bound Zionism to the cause of all the Allies, and made no reference at all to the rights of non-Jews.
“The Quai d’Orsay had been skillfully and decisively outmaneuvered” by Sokolow, according to Andrew and Kanya-Forstner. “The Zionists now had a written assurance of French support. France, however, had neither any assurance of Zionist support nor any prospect of obtaining one.” The French obstacle to a possible British declaration had been neutralized.

“Our purpose,” explained Sokolow, looking ahead, “is to receive from the [British] government a general short approval of the same kind as that which I have been successful in getting from the French government.” On arriving back in London, he deposited the Cambon letter at the Foreign Office, where it stimulated a spirit of competition. British officials who sympathized with Zionism now urged that Britain “go as far as the French.”
It was not only the Cambon letter that Sokolow secured during his continental sojourn. “Yes, yes, I believe we shall be good neighbors!” These words, spoken to Sokolow by Pope Benedict XV on May 4, 1917, thoroughly departed from the previous Catholic approach to Zionism. The visit to Rome had been urged upon Sokolow by the French and facilitated by Sykes. They had hoped that he might win over the government of yet another ally, Italy. But the Catholic Church was no smaller prize: it claimed rights to holy places all over Palestine and maintained, as a matter of theology, that the Jews had been dispersed as punishment for their refusal to accept Jesus as messiah. In 1904, Herzl had met with Pope Pius X, who told him in no uncertain terms that “the Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.” “Non possumus”—we cannot.

Yet Sokolow had an amiable meeting with Benedict, in which the pontiff described the return of the Jews to Palestine as “providential; God has willed it.” (Sokolow wrote up the exchange verbatim.) Sokolow assured the pope that the Zionists would respect the Vatican’s immemorial rights over the holy places, and the pope offered reciprocal assurances. The Italian government also gave Sokolow an assurance of its goodwill and sympathy. The Zionists in London hadn’t expected Sokolow to go to Rome or, when he did, to gain an audience with the pope. Only weeks earlier, Weizmann had written to Lord Rothschild that “I am afraid the Catholic influence is
asserting itself very strongly and is obscuring the political issues.” When Weizmann heard of the outcome at the Vatican, he congratulated Sokolow on his “brilliant result.”

At that point, Britain had pledged nothing, so Sokolow could be forgiven for informing Weizmann, from Paris, that “we have achieved here no less—and maybe more—than in your country [England] where we have been working for nearly three years.” In the months that followed, Weizmann and Sokolow worked in tandem with Sykes to close the gap and elicit a British declaration of support building on Sokolow’s achievements on the continent. The history of these efforts has been researched and analyzed in great depth. Here, too, Sokolow played a major role, drafting numerous documents, including the proposed formula for the declaration submitted by the Zionists to Balfour. It was Sokolow who coined the phrase “national home.”

But a crucial portion of the story unfolded not in London but in Washington. For just as Britain would never have moved on Palestine without the prior consent of its European allies, so it would not have acted without the agreement of President Woodrow Wilson. In April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany (although not on the Ottomans), making itself a major player in the anticipated post-war settlement. One more ally had to be persuaded before Britain could move.

Here, too, Sokolow had an effect, if only because he had recruited Louis D. Brandeis to the cause. This occurred during a whistle-stop visit by Sokolow to America right before the war, in March 1913. Sokolow, Weizmann later reminisced, was “on the alert for new men—and he found them. He was the Columbus, so to speak, who discovered Louis D. Brandeis.” And it was Brandeis, whom Wilson named a Supreme Court justice in 1916, who led the campaign to gain an American buy-in to a British declaration. Brandeis was kept fully in the picture about developments in Britain and on the continent; as Sokolow later wrote, “the negotiations in political circles in England and France were known in America, every success was welcomed there with enthusiasm, and often, also, received further support.”

The American policy establishment was entirely hostile to Zionism: the Zionist idea seemed impractical, and missionary interests opposed it. On the first ask, in September 1917, Wilson had withheld his approval. Only the second time around in mid-October, when Wilson received the proposed text from London, did he change his mind. “I find in my pocket the memorandum you gave me about the Zionist Movement,” he wrote to his trusted foreign-affairs adviser, Col. Edward House. “I am afraid I did not say to you that I concurred in the formula suggested by the other side [Britain]. I do, and would be obliged if you would let them know it.” House did so, discreetly—even Wilson’s secretary of state wasn’t informed.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

 

[Sixties Fan]

75 years ago: Jewish heroes saving lives - and getting killed for it​

Heroes Haim Graf and Mordechai Komornik

There were two interesting and related articles in the Palestine Post of March 22, 1948, on events that happened 75 years ago today, that were both about Jewish heroes.

The first real heroes were two guards, Haim Graf and Mordechai Komornik, who saw smoke coming out of the abandoned vehicle outside the Solel Boneh building in Haifa. They warned scores of people about a truck bomb - and who were killed by that very bomb as they were pushing the truck away from the crowded building.


Unfortunately, four were killed besides the guards, including a father and his five year old son.

The other heroic story was of a different type:


The Jews rushed to save the lives of their armed enemies - and Zichron Mizrahi paid with his life.

Why did the Arab Legionnaires assume that the Jews who were trying to rescue them were attacking them?

Because that is how Arabs would act!

Palestinian Arabs have a different idea of what being a "hero" means. They have used the word "heroic" consistently with every single murder of a Jew this year (and every other year) by an Arab.

If you want to know a people, know who they consider their heroes.

75 years ago: Jewish heroes saving lives - and getting killed for it

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[P F Tinmore]

According to Arab interpretations of international law in 1930, Jews have the sole right to the Temple Mount today!​

​

Kotel, circa 1920

According to Palestinian media, the League of Arab States declared that the 1930 international commission that declared that Muslims had legal ownership of the Western Wall is still true, and the Western Wall - as well as the plaza in front of it - is all Muslim Waqf land where Jews have no legal rights.

While US and European leaders have fallen over themselves to condemn Bezalel Smotrich for saying that the Palestinian people are a recent invention, saying that statements like that are inflammatory, there is silence in both diplomatic circles and the media about the Arabs denying any rights of Jews to the very place that they have prayed towards for thousands of years.

Selective outrage is the norm, of course. Arabs are expected to say inflammatory, inciting and false statements - they do this every day - but only Jews are expected to speak in measured tones and not to plainly state the truth if it might upset the touchy Arabs.

But there is a very interesting angle to the newfound Palestinian love of the 1930 Western Wall Commission report. (They made it clear at the time that they do not accept that the Commission has any legal right to rule on the issue.)

If you look closer at the specific Muslim claims in 1930 quoted in the Commission report, you find out that according to their logic at the time, Israel is the legal owner today not only of the Kotel but of all of Jerusalem.

The Muslim side, represented by Ahmed Zaki Pasha, declared the Muslim legal case to the Commission:




The Arab side is saying explicitly that the way that land in Palestine changes legal ownership is by the right of conquest. They admit that Jews owned the land before any Arabs did, legally, by conquering it. Then the Romans, Byzantines and finally Muslims had legal ownership because of their subsequent conquests. And even the Muslim ownership of the Temple Mount and Western Wall had only been for "many centuries" because of the Muslim conquest of the land.

Since then, of course, the Jews re-conquered the land of Israel. And therefore, according to the Muslim's own testimony to this commission that they now say has legal weight, Jews have complete ownership of all of Jerusalem today, having conquered the city in 1967.

This is not the only part of the Muslim claims from 1930 that undermine their claim today.

One is that the 1930 claims admitted that the original holiness of the Temple Mount came from the Temples themselves, which today's Palestinian deny ever existed:



Another most interesting section notes that according to Sharia law, once land is declared sacred Waqf land, it cannot lose that status - except for one case:



Israel has certainly had unquestioned possession of the Kotel since 1967, and arguably all of Jerusalem. (This is probably a very weak argument under Sharia; I imagine any dispute by the previous owner would make usucaption invalid, but it is a fun argument.)

Perhaps the Palestinians shouldn't be so quick to embrace the 1930 international commission report. It shows that the same Muslim legal reasonings that sounded good to them in 1930 can now be used against them.

According to Arab interpretations of international law in 1930, Jews have the sole right to the Temple Mount today!

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

• Declaration of Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation Among States in Accordance With the Charter of the United Nations, G.A. Res. 2625 (1970) (‘No territorial acquisition resulting from the threat or use of force shall be recognized as legal.”); Third Report on State Responsibility: Report by Special Rapporteur James Crawford, at 23, para. 410 (2000) (‘States may not recognize as lawful, for example, a unilateral acquisition of territory procured by the use of force, even if the use of force was arguably lawful’.).
• The Re-Emergence of Conquest: International Law and the Legitimate Use of Force - Liverpool Law Review

 

[MartyNYC]

World-renowned Arab intellectual Fouad Ajami:
“On a barren land Zionists built a durable state. Under a long siege it maintained a deep, abiding democratic ethos. Arabs could have learned from this experiment but they drew back in horror. The Arab militaries and demagogues claimed they would win the war lost by the old order. They would fare no better.”

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