Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 3, 2020

Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street has a video primer on the history of the conflict that while obviously from a liberal Zionist perspective (the Temple Mount), is good on the unfairness of Trumps deal of the century, showing that Palestinian areas would be connected by a spaghetti of roads.

I like Ben-Amis explanation of the British Balfour Declaration of 1917.

Its one of those things that is absolutely key to understanding this. The British in the course of fighting World War 1 were looking for the support domestically in the U.K. of the Jewish community and there was a desire to offer and to promise to that community something that they wanted in order to have their support for the war effort. And one of the promises that was made was by Lord Balfour to the Jewish community, that in fact the entirety of the British Mandate would be a national homeland for the Jewish people.

And it is a promise, it is on the record. The only real problem is that at the exact same time the British were promising it to the Jews, there was a whole set of correspondence from the Foreign Office going on with the Arab families, the leading families, the ruling families down in Arabia, promising the exact same land as a national home and an Arab state, and that of course, when the war was over, the control and power would be handed over to the Arab population.

So there were very conflicting promises. For the Jewish community, the Balfour Declaration has taken on epic and biblical propoprtions. The McMahon correspondence in the same time with the Arabs was not quite as well known in our history books.

This is a good, straightforward answer. The British regarded the Jewish population as significant to the war effort, enough to want to buy their support with a big colonial gift. And in fact the British were in competition with the Germans on this score.

There is a great deal of denial about this realpolitik in academic quarters. During the centennial of the Balfour Declaration, I heard a lot of arguments about British settler colonialism and the British being fooled by antisemitic theories of Jewish power, or wanting to get rid of the Jews, not to mention the personal magnetism of Chaim Weizmann to waltz into the British power circle and convince them about the need for Zionism.

No, the Balfour Declaration was the act of a colonial overlord trying to please an influential minority inside the country, a minority British leaders perceived to be Zionist. The Brits presumably knew what they were doing. They were experts at the great game. We can debate why they saw the Jewish community as significant, whether it was international finance and the ability to provide bonds, or the newfound powers of the international press. And yes, there may have been some exaggeration of Jewish powers.

Yet Ben-Amis point stands, the British wanted the Jewish community on their side. As vulnerable as Jews were in Europe, they also had some agency. They had a strong Zionist lobby in England and in the U.S., where Louis Brandeis converted to their cause and shepherded the Wilson administrations endorsement of Balfour. That lobby remains an important factor in western policymaking to this day. Ben-Ami is part of it.

More here:
Balfour Declaration was issued to gain Jewish support for war effort, Ben-Ami explains - Mondoweiss

Category: Zionism
Tags: