The Balfour Declarations many questions

Palestinian women protest the Balfour Declaration in the West Bank city of Nablus
on 2 November 2017.Ayman AmeenAPA images

Joseph Massad - 8 November 2017

In their attempt to cleanse the newly invented Europe from everything that was un-
Christian and therefore un-Western, Enlightened Europeans invented in the late
18th century what they called the Eastern Question and its subsidiary the
Jewish Question.

Both questions were to become central to European imperial aims of splintering

the Ottoman Empire and taking over its territories. By the early 20th century, as
World War I was coming to a close, these Enlightened Europeans opted to resolve
the two Questions by transmuting them through settler-colonialism into what they
called the Palestine Question.
The Eastern Question

The Eastern Question was the question of the East encroaching on the West, which
was the question of the Ottoman Empire that had to be defeated. Its defeat was
finally at hand by the close of World War I, and with it, the West resolved the
Eastern Question.

As for the Jewish Question, it was related to the persistence of the East within the
West, which Enlightened and un-Enlightened European Christians found
intolerable. It is true that both Judaism and Christianity are Palestinian religions. It
is also an established historical fact that the inhabitants of what came to be called
Europe later, whether Christians or Jews, had converted to these Palestinian
religions centuries after the Palestinians had.

It is also true that these new Christians of what would become Europe never
thought of themselves as direct descendants of the ancient Palestinian Christians
who spoke Aramaic, but saw themselves correctly as more recent converts to this
Palestinian religion.

Yet these same Christian converts often insisted that converts to Judaism in what
would become Europe were somehow descendants of the ancient Palestinian
Hebrews who also spoke Aramaic at the time of the so-called Roman expulsion of
the first century.

This was important because these converts to Christianity accused the converts to
Judaism of killing the Palestinian Christ. Still later, neither Orthodox nor Catholic
Christianities ever thought of expelling these Jews to Palestine. Nor did these
converts to Judaism ever seek to emigrate en masse from their countries to
Palestine either.

As converts to Christianity pondered the geography from which the faith to which
they converted had originated, they decided that it must come under their
jurisdiction. This was the origin of the first European Christian Zionism that came
to be known as the Crusades. The Protestants, the fundamentalist Christians of the
Renaissance, became obsessed with European Jews, again seeing them not as local
converts to Judaism, but as somehow still connected to ancient Palestine, and
began to call for their so-called return to the Holy Land as part of the Millenarian
project to expedite the second coming of Christ. European Jews resisted and, along
with their American co-religionists, still resist these calls for mass self-expulsion
from Europe and the United States to a distant Asian land.

The Jewish Question

It is in this context that Enlightened Europeans posed what they called in the late
18th century the Jewish Question, as a question of foreign Oriental Asiatics
living in Occidental Europe. Napoleon called on French Jews to make sure they
did not still practice Oriental Judaism, which allowed men to marry more than one
wife, before he accepted them as equal citizens in post-revolutionary France. A
delegation of French Jews assured him that European Ashkenazi Jews banned such
un-Christian heresies in the 12th century and that they were thus practically
Christian.

Droves of West European Jews rushed to convert formally to Christianity in the

19th century or to create a new kind of Judaism that they called Reform Judaism, a
Judaism that so resembled Christianity, one could almost mistake them for one
another almost!

But that was not enough; by the middle of the 19th century, with the rise of the
biological and racial sciences, the Jewish Question was no longer about a
population that had been de-Europeanized and Asianized in its origins, but one
about racial foreignness and inferiority.

This unfolded in the age of European nationalisms that often based themselves on
common language and territory but increasingly on the fantasy of a common race.
First articulated by European philologists in the late 18th century, the difference
between what they called Indo-European or Aryan languages and Semitic
languages was transformed in the middle of the 19th century into a biological
racial question.

Never mind that European Jews did not speak a Semitic language at all; the false
claim that they were descendants of the ancient Hebrews was sufficient. That the
ancient Palestinian Christians like ancient Palestinian Jews spoke Aramaic, which
was now designated a Semitic language, did not, however, render European
Christians Semites. They were decidedly Indo-European, and the lucky amongst
them, pure Aryans.

The Jewish response

The response of European Jews to these developments varied and took the shape of
four organized responses that vied with one another for the support of Jews as well
as Christians.

The least powerful group, which antagonized the majority of Jews, was the
Zionists. Founded at a congress in August 1897, this group decided to ally
itself consciously with anti-Semites, Protestant millenarians, and imperialists and
adopted a racialized Jewish nationalism that joined European racialized
nationalisms in their colonial mission.

Its founder, Theodor Herzl, minced no words when he declared that the anti-
Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our
allies. Zionists believed that the Jews were a separate race and nation and that all
Jews must join the Zionist national colonial settler project.

The second group was committed to socialism, and included Jews who joined
socialist parties and the General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland and
Russia, known as the Bund. The Bund was founded a few weeks after the first
Zionist Congress, in October 1897. Unlike the Zionists, the Bundists, and all the
other socialist Jews, allied themselves with the enemies of anti-Semitism, and the
enemies of imperialism and racialized nationalism. They saw the Zionists as right-
wing enemies of the Jews and of communism.

The third group was mostly composed of assimilated Jews of Western Europe and
the United States, who believed that their assimilation and their Reform Judaism
made them inseparable from the country-specific nations where they resided and
from their nationalisms. Thus German Jews, British Jews, French Jews and
American Jews saw themselves as German, British, French and American, as most
of them still do today. They also fought the Zionists as endangering their status in
their own countries.

The fourth group was the Orthodox Jews who, in their majority, objected to
Zionism on religious grounds, and saw it as a dangerous anti-Jewish heresy. The
assimilated Reform Jews and the Orthodox Jews of Germany joined hands and
banned Herzl from convening the First Zionist Congress in Munich and forced him
to move it to the neighboring Swiss town of Basel.

The Zionists tried to find allies among the assimilated Jews during World War I
(with more success in the United States than in Europe) and with the Orthodox (in
the case of the latter, they only managed to get one group of Orthodox Ashkenazi
Jews, who called themselves the Mizrachi movement, to join them).

It is in occupying the mantle of anti-communism, however, and in espousing anti-

Semitic ideas about the foreignness of Jews and their racialization, as well as their
support for imperialism, that they were able to find much more powerful allies
among European Christian colonial powers.

Herzl made sure to approach all European governments that had Asian and African
colonies and territories or were likely to acquire them soon (including Italy,
Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Britain, Russia) as well as the Ottomans to gain them
as allies and supporters of his scheme to send European Jews to Palestine. His
strategy took some time, but it would be his colleagues in the World Zionist
Organization who would reap the benefits of these ties. Herzls successors would
be able to secure a colonial sponsor on the occasion of the first global catastrophe
of the 20th century, namely during World War I.

The pre-history of the Balfour Declaration

But the story begins at the turn of the century. It was Herzls then British
imperialist ally who would set the stage for the Balfour Declaration, namely
Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain.

As Regina Sharif explains in her important 1983 book Non-Jewish Zionism,

Chamberlain was an imperialist, a Protestant Zionist, and an early enthusiast
supporting Jewish Zionism. As a known anti-Semite, he was not solely motivated
by his Protestantism, but also by finances and money that could aid British
imperialism, which, in line with common anti-Semitic views, he thought the
Jews possessed.

During the Fourth Zionist Congress, held in London in 1900, Herzl had already
postulated that Britain would be key to the Zionist movement. He declared that
From this place the Zionist movement will take a higher and higher flight
England the great with her eyes on the seven seas will understand us.

As East European Jews were fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms to Western Europe,

including Britain, and to the United States, British officials, who opposed
admitting them into Britain, set up a commission to deal with the problem. Herzl
was invited in 1902 to testify before the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration.
Of the 175 witnesses to the commission, he offered a solution to the problem,
namely, a diverting of the stream of migration from Eastern Europe. The Jews
of Eastern Europe cannot stay where they are where are they to go? If you find
that they are not wanted here, then some place must be found to which they can
migrate without that migration raising the problems that confront them here. Those
problems will not arise if a home is found for them which will be legally
recognized as Jewish.

It is this testimony that impressed Nathaniel Rothschild, the first Lord Rothschild,
who was a member of the Royal Commission as the Jewish representative, and
who had been until then antagonistic toward Herzl and Zionism. (It would be his
son Lionel, the second Lord Rothschild, to whom the Balfour Declaration would
be addressed.)

Zionist colonization of Palestine would do away with having to deal with Jewish
immigrants to Britain. The anti-Semitic and Christian Zionist Chamberlain would
soon meet with Herzl to organize how British imperialism and Protestant Zionism
could help Jewish Zionism get rid of Britains Jewish problem.

Balfours Zionist anti-Semitism

It is in view of this common goal that Chamberlain offered Egypts Sinai Peninsula
and El-Arish, which Britain controlled, to Herzl as a homeland for the Jews as
early as 1902, and soon after also offered British East Africa, or Uganda, for
Jewish colonization and the establishment of a Jewish homeland.

Chamberlain expectedly opposed Jewish immigration to Britain, and along with

the Zionists had other possible destinations for East European Jews fleeing Russian
pogroms. This was not only based on his Protestant Zionism but also on British
imperial designs in the Sinai and the protection of the Suez Canal.

When British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, an ardent Protestant Zionist,

shepherded the Aliens Act of 1905 through the House of Commons to ban East
European Jewish immigration, Balfours concern was to save the country from
what he called the undoubted evils of an immigration which was largely
Jewish. Like Chamberlain, the anti-Semitic and Christian Zionist Balfour had in
mind another colonial destination for Jewish immigrants.

Whereas the Sixth Zionist Congress rejected the Uganda offer, it would be the
Seventh Zionist Congress meeting in Basel in 1905 that set it aside for good. On
account of the Aliens Act, the Seventh Congress condemned Balfour as an anti-
Semite, and declared that his views amounted to open anti-Semitism against the
whole Jewish people. But at the same time, the Congress thanked the British
government headed by Balfour for its pro-Zionist Uganda offer. The Congress
registered with satisfaction the recognition accorded by the British government to
the Zionist organization in its desire to bring about a solution of the Jewish
problem, and expresses a sincere hope that it may be accorded the further good
offices of the British government where available in any matter it may undertake in
accordance with the Basel program of colonizing Palestine.

Chamberlain and Balfour both believed in the superiority and unique virtues of the
Anglo-Saxon race. Balfour, also, like the Jewish Zionists, believed that the Jews
were a people apart, and not merely held a religion differing from the vast
majority of their fellow-countrymen.

As late as 1914, he told his friend Chaim Weizmann that he shared many of the
anti-Semitic views of German Jews held by Cosima Wagner, wife of the
notoriously anti-Semitic composer Richard Wagner. At the time, Weizmann was
busy selling the Protestant Zionist Prime Minister Lloyd George on the Jewish
Zionist idea.

From 1914 onwards, the Zionists, in the person of the British Jewish politician
Herbert Samuel, argued that once the Eastern Question was resolved with the
demise of the Ottoman Empire, Jewish colonists would fill the vacuum in Palestine
in the interest of British imperial aims, protecting the country from being taken
over by Britains imperialist rivals, the French, or worse, by the Germans.
Samuel, whose efforts were central to secure British support for Jewish Zionism,
would become the first British High Commissioner of Palestine in July 1920.

The Communist Question

As the Eastern Question was being resolved, however, a new question was quickly
taking its place as a threat to European imperialist interests, namely that of
communism.

The specter of communism, as Marx had predicted, had been haunting Europe for
half a century, and the assault on the Paris Commune in 1871, successful as it was,
did not do away with the growing threat.
But the term anti-Semitism, which was invented in 1879 to distinguish Jews
from Aryans racially, not religiously, was soon coupled with anti-communism.
While the Zionists were colluding with anti-Semites as to which location European
Jews should be relocated in Asia, Africa or Latin America, East European
socialists Jews and Christians alike were working to end tyrannical and anti-
Semitic regimes and free people from their yoke.

The association of Jews with communism by anti-Semites was expected.

Beginning with Marxs Jewish origins, the conspiracy theory would have it that
communism across Europe, and Bolshevism specifically, were part of a Jewish
conspiracy to end Western civilization. As the Russian communists (including
the Jewish Bund) were gaining ground increasingly after the February 1917
revolution which brought Alexander Kerensky to power, and as British troops were
approaching Palestine, Balfour would make his infamous declaration.

That the Protestant Zionism of Lloyd George and Balfour, who returned as foreign
secretary from 1916 to 1919, was fully compatible with British imperialism was
more than fortuitous. The timing of the Balfour Declaration, containing the British
pledge to Lord Rothschild and the Zionists, being issued only five days before the
triumph of the October Revolution in Russia, was hardly coincidental.

The triumph of Russian communists, Jewish and Christian alike, who were the
enemy of anti-Semitism and Zionism, meant that East European Jews had no more
reason to emigrate, putting in jeopardy the British imperial and Zionist plans for
Palestine. By making the pledge to help secure a national home for the Jewish
people in Palestine, the British were offering another venue for East European
Jews and egging them not to support the communists.

Churchills Zionist anti-Semitism

Whereas the anti-Semitic claim that communism and Bolshevism were Jewish
conspiracies are often attributed to the Nazis who imported them from the
propaganda of the White Russians, into Western Europe, it was none other than
Winston Churchill who first articulated clearly the stakes of communism as a
Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, versus Zionism as a colluder with
imperialism, and which offered an imperial solution to the Jewish problem.

In an article he published in the Sunday Herald in February 1920, Churchill

expressed support for assimilated Jews who identified with their country of
citizenship, but thought of them as outside the power equation that he wanted to
explicate, namely the one between Zionism and communism.
He started by heaping scorn on what he termed international Jews and identified
communism as a Jewish world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization:

The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship are
excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has tended more and
more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with the villainies which are now being
perpetrated It becomes, therefore, specially important to foster and develop any
strongly marked Jewish movement which leads directly away from these fatal
associations. And it is here that Zionism has such a deep significance for the whole
world at the present time Zionism offers the third sphere to the political
conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it
presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character. It has fallen to the
British Government, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the
opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world
a home and a center of national life. The statesmanship and historic sense of Mr.
Balfour were prompt to seize this opportunity. Declarations have been made which
have irrevocably decided the policy of Great Britain.

Churchill finally concludes that:

Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a

powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international
communistic system. Nothing could be more significant than the fury with which
Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr. [Weizmann] in particular. The
cruel penetration of his mind leaves him in no doubt that his schemes of a world-
wide communistic state under Jewish domination are directly thwarted and
hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in
every land towards a simpler, a truer and a far more attainable goal. The struggle
which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a
struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.

Zionisms enmity toward communist Jews would become a longstanding tradition.

When official American anti-Semitism targeted Jewish communists as Soviet
spies, and tried and executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 on flimsy
evidence, Israel did not utter a word in protest. (Israeli rabbis, excluding the
Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, sent a plea to President Truman appealing for
clemency for the Rosenbergs, though some of them later expressed public
regret that they had signed it.)

When Hungarian fascists and Hitlerites were smuggled into Budapest from the
Austrian border by the CIA during the regime of Imre Nagy and began
slaughtering Hungarian communist Jews and Hungarian Jews as communists in
1956, Israel and other Zionist Jews remained silent and remain so today. Even
when leftist Jews were targeted by the anti-Semitic Argentinian generals in the late
1970s, Zionist Argentinian Jews and Israel disavowed them, and Israel maintained
its close alliance with the military regime.

Churchills explanation clarifies the connections between Protestant and Jewish

Zionism, between racialist nationalism and anti-racialist communism, and between
Zionist settler-colonialism and communist anti-imperialism. The imperial racism
shared by the British and the Zionist movement toward the Palestinians and other
Asians and Africans rendered their presence on their lands, let alone their
opposition and resistance to settler-colonialism, of no import.

Balfour himself insisted that Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted
in age-long traditions, 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.

It was left to Lord Sydenham, a British conservative member of parliament, to

identify with the Palestinians against Zionism: the Jews, he said, had no more
right to Palestine than the descendants of the ancient Romans had to this country.

The story of the last century of Zionist colonialism and colonization of Palestine
that the British sponsored and continue to sponsor and the Palestinian resistance it
fostered remain with us today. Early Palestinian protests and opposition to the theft
of their country and lands by European converts to Judaism, facilitated by
European converts to Christianity, were dismissed as baseless.

In his meetings with the British government in 1923, Herbert Samuel insisted that
Arab opposition to Zionism was based on a misunderstanding of its goals and that
responsible Zionist leaders did not intend to confiscate Arab lands or flood the
country with Jewish immigrants. All that the Palestinians feared and expected
came true, but all that Christian and Jewish Zionists expected did not. The
Palestinians did not surrender and they continue to fight against Zionist
colonialism and racism today.
Israel has killed more than 100,000 Palestinians and Arabs since 1948, thousands
more were killed by the British and the Zionists between 1917 and 1948. Israel has
expelled half the population of historic Palestine who continue to live in exile
while the other half lives under different racist and colonial laws and regulations in
Israel and the West Bank and Gaza.

The majority of the worlds Jews today live in their countries of origin and refuse
to go to Israel. These include the majority of US Jews, Latin American Jews,
French Jews, Russian Jews and British Jews, among others.

When the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, a majority of prominent British
Jews opposed it. When the US government endorsed it soon after its issuance, 300
prominent public American Jewish figures, including congressmen, rabbis and
businessmen, signed petitions against it. This Jewish opposition remained strong
until the end of World War II. While the Zionist movement and Israel were able
after the Nazi holocaust and 1948 to sway world Jewry from their former
opposition to Zionism, it has failed to convince a majority of them to leave their
countries and move to it. The majority of Jews who did go to Israel went there not
out of ideological commitment, but fleeing oppression and denied any other
destination (in the case of Arab Jews, Israel organized attacks on them, as
the Mossad did in Iraq, to spur their emigration). Yet Israels colonial oppression
of the Palestinian people and the theft of their lands proceed apace.

Britains continuing crimes

Meanwhile, the Eastern Question, the Jewish Question and the communist threat
have all been transmuted into the Palestine Question, which persists against all
odds in the form of Zionist settler-colonialism. All the efforts to defeat the
Palestinian people by Britain, Israel, France, Germany and the United States (not to
mention the Arab countries) have failed over the last century.

The British governments celebration of the centenary of the Balfour Declaration is

in fact an expression of pride in the anti-Semitic, anti-communist and racist
colonial legacy of Britain, which the British government insists on perpetuating in
the land of the Palestinians and on the Palestinian people.

Prime Minister Theresa May recently declared: We are proud of the role that we
played in the creation of the State of Israel, and we will certainly mark the
centenary with pride. Like Balfour before her, May refused to even name the
Palestinians. If the Balfour Declaration referred to the Palestinians as the non-
Jewish communities in Palestine, May conceded only that We also must be
conscious of the sensitivities that some people do have about the Balfour
Declaration and we recognize that there is more work to be done (emphasis
added).

The collaborationist Palestinian Authority has threatened to sue Britain over its
celebration of the centennial unless the latter offers a mere apology to the
Palestinian people for having issued the Balfour Declaration in the first place. Such
obsequiousness is to be expected from an authority whose sole role has been to
suppress Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonialism and which has worked
assiduously in the last quarter century to repress the political and national rights of
the Palestinian people.

But a century on, Zionist colonialism is no more secure than it ever was and lacks a
sense of permanence today as much as it did in 1917. That official Britain, as
Mays pride demonstrates, has been and remains an implacable enemy of the
Palestinian people is not in dispute. As for the more work to be done, it is an
urgent necessity that Britain should be put on trial, not only for issuing the
infamous declaration, but also for all its past and present crimes against the
Palestinian people.
This essay is based on a lecture delivered on 2 November 2017 at the French
National Assembly in Paris hosted by parliamentarian Fabien Roussel, and at Dar
al-Janub in Vienna on 4 November.

Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at

Columbia University. He is the author most recently of Islam in
Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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