England's responsibility for the violence in the Middle East - Draiman

England's responsibility for the violence in the Middle East

The parlous condition of the Jewish people over a large part of the known world, and particularly in such countries as Germany, Poland and Rumania, has called increasing attention to the workings of the Mandate for Palestine now administered by Great Britain under the authority of the League of Nations. The Mandate, when it was written, as well as the antecedent Balfour Declaration, clearly contemplated that the "home" to be established in Palestine was intended for the whole Jewish people who were to be established there by international sanction in the future. The intention was to provide a sane and reasonable solution to the age-old Jewish Diaspora problem, and it anticipated those circumstances which have rendered so large a portion of the Jewish race homeless.

If this was indeed the purpose of the Mandate it has proved a miserable failure, since it has solved nothing and has only succeeded in adding a new and formidable problem to a world already sinking under the weight of problems. Many reasons are adduced for this failure. Much is made of the irreconcilable differences between Arabs and Jews, instigated by the British, which the mandatory now claims render the Mandate unworkable.

The circumstances under which the Balfour Declaration and Mandate were issued. Napolean Bonaparte in 1799 offered The Jews in Palestine to reestablish the Jewish Home in Palestine. The false assertion that the Declaration was extorted from an unwilling Britain by Jewish financiers during the War can be obviously disposed of as a pure invention of the anti-Semitic mind. Another and more reasonable claim made to justify Britain's position in this matter is that she was totally ignorant of the real conditions in Palestine and the actual problems she was letting herself

in for when she made her bargain with the Jews; Britain renaged abd violated the terms of the Mandate; furtheremore, behind the scenes Britain encouraged Arab riots and violence against the Jews in Palestine and turned a blind eye while hundreds of thousands of Arabs entered Palestine from other Arab Lands. Under examination this contention loses much of its plausibility. For a hundred years Zionism, as we shall see, had been almost as much an English movement as it was a purely Jewish one. As for local conditions in Palestine, it is undoubted that British officialdom knew more about Arab social and economic problems than the Jews aspiring to settle there. From the time the American scholar Robinson attempted to explore archaeological remains in the Holy Landin 1837, London has, through the Palestine Exploration Fund, concentrated on the study of every minute detail that related to Palestine. "Theirs," state De Haas and Wise, "were the surveys, the compilation of flora and fauna, theirs too the enumeration and localization of the Bedouin tribes; theirs the studies in local conditions, the compilation of customs and excise, estimates of population, speculation as to the origins of peoples, observations on everything that relates to the area between the River of Egypt and the cedars of Lebanon." 1 Reaching far back into the 1840's, Lord Palmerston had compiled for his Government thorough material on Palestine, considering the possibility of exercising a British protectorate over that region in the Jewish interests. Since that time the accumulation has been so vast that it is only fair to say that the British archives contain a better survey of Arab social, economic, agricultural and other problems than the Arabs have of themselves.

As for the Balfour Declaration itself, it may be assumed that Lord Balfour, its author is an infallible witness to its intended purpose.

He wrote: "The national and international status of the Jews to that of other races . . . would be promoted by giving them that which all other nations possess: a local habitation and a national home . . . [where] they would bear corporate responsibilities and enjoy corporate duties of a kind which, from the nature of the case, they can never possess as citizens of any non-Jewish state." 2 It will be evident from the records that neither the Declaration nor the Mandate confers upon non-Jews any rights which would allow them to interfere with the growth and operation of the National Home. It is obvious that if these documents were to be interpreted so as to include National Home rights to legally present non-Jews, both the National Home grant to the Jews and the rights of non-Jews would be repealed by implication. The document would then repeal itself, which on the face of it would be a reduction ad absurdum.

As will also be seen from these pages, British trusteeship of the Holy Land was the result of Jewish demand itself, Wedgwood admitting rather shamefacedly in this respect that the Jews were "almost the only non-Anglo-Saxon people who seem to believe that on the whole England does try to behave decently towards other people." Although history has proven otherwise. The French offered to take over the Mandate for Palestine, which might have produced a better result. 3

The records prove beyond any doubt; that, the British Mandatory for Palestine has followed a deliberate violation of the Mandate terms and defaulting British policy in respect to its obligations there, and has itself largely created the conditions which it now so thoroughly decries. A large share of its biased policies have been motivated entirely by British power politics in the Mediterranean, in which the British Mandate was used for the purpose of surrounding British Imperial strategy in the Middle East with the aura of sanctity. A factor of even greater importance, however, is the gross anti-Semitism of a handful of civil servants in the bureaus of Whitehall and Westminster, which exists to these days 2016. It is to the phobia of these men against Jews that most of the troubles agitating the

Holy Land can be traced. Its wantonness is not flaunted; it is true, like the excesses of the German Nazis or the Polish Endeks.

It lies icily beneath the shining hardness of bureaucratic logic.

It is overlaid with the softness of English colonial skill - but, as we shall discover, it is in no sense less intense, and fully as implacable, as the open anti-Semitism of the Nazis on the Continent.

This, briefly, will be found to be the underlying condition which hides beneath the maze of pretension by which London has consistently and falsely justified its bad faith to the Jews and to the world. It is this factor which has caused the declared policy of the British Mandate to fail so ignominiously and which has allowed the Holy Land in these past years to be given over to Arab hooligans and desperadoes who have murdered its citizens, burned its crops and houses and demoralized its commerce.

The records are voluminous. The Arabs received over five million square miles of territory after WWI, which established 22 Arab states. It is interesting to note that the Arab Land have terrorized and expelled over a million Jewish families from the Arab countries; they confiscated all their assets; businesses, homes and over 70,000 square miles of Jewish owned land. The Jews have lived in the Arab lands for over 2500 years. Most of the expelled Jews have been resettled in Israel and today comprise over half the population.