Anticipating the Queen’s Speech

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Anticipating the Queen’s Speech

90th Anniversary of Balfour Declaration

“Did We Double-Cross the Arabs?”

The Siege of Gaza Is Going to Lead to a Violent Escalation

Gordon Brown’s statement to parliament on July 11, 2007, will be reiterated by the Queen in her speech to parliament today, November 6. Brown talked of education, health care and housing, also reaffirming the plan to bring in new “anti terror” legislation.

            Brown’s rhetoric was the usual promises about a better education system which is in a fast changing world there providing “opportunities for all”, meanwhile tuition fees and private academies are destroying the right to education.  Brown talked of the new Pensions Bill, while pensioners are living in poverty not having their rights to be cared for and provided for by the society. Brown talked of building new housing for 3 million families while council waiting lists are huge and people are left in hostels, hospitals and on the streets.   Brown also proposed the Climate Change Bill, while the government has a record of inaction on climate change and refusing to curb the irresponsibility of the monopolies.   On the NHS, Brown appears to advocate high quality care for patients while selling off the NHS to the private sector. Brown also promised a Bill to stop children falling under the poverty line, while the reality is that a third of children live under the poverty line. Brown also presented an outline of what the government were going to do in regards to “terrorism”: new measures to ensure more against terrorist “suspects” are incarcerated; increased penalties for “terrorists” charged with other criminal offences; increase in the period of interrogation without charge; and the use of “intercept material” – meaning that while lauding the “liberty” which is Britain’s “gift to the world”, Brown is attacking the rights of all in the name of preserving “our way of life”.

            What is objectively happening in terms of the anti-social offensive against the people is made the target of lip-service by the government. The offensive against the people is increased, on the one hand, while the rhetoric and hypocrisy on the other is an attempt to hoodwink the people that their problems are being addressed. This is all done with a high moral tone by Gordon Brown, which signals a profound attack on the rights of all the people and an upholding of all the values of a colonial power and a Britain whose bounds are set “wider still and wider”. This is the vile oppression of the working class and people at home and the exporting of an enslaving and exploiting civilising mission by the “mother of the free”.

            From proposals for the government’s programme, it can be seen that the working class and people need to fight on the basis of the rights of all. Brown and the Queen will present a united front on attacking the working class and people, the power of the executive being derived from the royal prerogative and the absolutism of parliament against the people from the monarch in parliament. The working class and people must unite under one banner also, which is the banner modern communism. Their programme is the complete emancipation of humanity. The battles to safeguard the future of the NHS, to increase investments in social programmes that do not go to paying the rich, to defend the rights of all, must be stepped up at this time and united into one tide so as to defeat the programme of New Labour which is blocking the people from taking matters into their own hands.

            WDIE will deal with the specific details of the Queen’s Speech in future postings.

November 2 was the 90th anniversary of the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917. We are reposting an extract from the article “Britain and Palestine: A Criminal History of Intervention” which appeared in WDIE, September 12, 2006.

 

            Britain’s interest in Palestine in modern times can be said to have begun in the fist half of the 19th century. In 1839, the British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Palmerston, began encouraging Jewish immigration to Palestine, which was then part of the declining Ottoman Empire, as part of Britain’s policy of supporting this crumbling empire in order to thwart the strategic and territorial ambitions of its economic and political rivals, at that time especially France and Russia. Palmerston argued that Jewish immigrants would owe some allegiance to Britain and would therefore give Britain an indirect influence over Palestine, which occupied an important strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean. He reasoned that Jewish immigration under British influence would in time also create a buffer zone between Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, thus preventing the emergence of Egypt as a strong regional power in the area, which might become a threat to Britain’s interests. In order to further this aim, Palmerston proposed that the Palestinian people should be removed from Palestine and re-settled in northern Iraq. Although no deportation of the Palestinian population took place at that time, Britain’s involvement in the creation of the Palestinian “problem” was clearly demonstrated, as was its pragmatic utilisation of the Zionist movement, which in this period was still in its embryonic stage.

            As today, the intervention of Britain and other western powers in Palestine and the Middle East in the 19th century created major instability in the area. As the Zionist movement developed at the end of the 19th century, it sought to reach a closer agreement with British imperialism over the future of Palestine. In the opening years of the 20th century, the Zionist movement established close links with David Lloyd George, the future Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, the future Foreign Secretary, Herbert Samuel, a future High Commissioner for Palestine and Sir Mark Sykes, who became Chief Secretary of the War Cabinet. The evidence shows that one of the aims of Britain’s political leaders during the First World War, in order to safeguard Britain’s interests in the region, including the Suez Canal, was to annex Palestine and “plant” millions of Jewish settlers

            When the First World War broke out in 1914, Palestine therefore remained an important prize to be fought over by Britain and the other big powers. In 1915, the British government made a secret agreement concerning the future of Palestine with the Sherifian monarchy of Arabia (the McMahon-Hussein correspondence), in which in order to gain an alliance with Arab peoples during the war it promised “to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the Sherif of Mecca”. However, the following year another secret agreement was made between Britain and France, with the support of the other Entente powers, to divide the entire Middle East region into two “spheres of influence” and place Palestine under international, although largely British, control (the Sykes-Picot agreement). When this secret agreement was made public by the Bolsheviks following the Russian Revolution, the British government sent a reassuring message to Sherif Hussein stating that "the Entente Powers are determined that the Arab race shall be given full opportunity of once again forming a nation in the world ... So far as Palestine is concerned, we are determined that no people shall be subject to another". Even when Allied troops occupied Palestine and other parts of the Middle East formerly under Ottoman rule, such as modern Syria and Lebanon, the British government stated that “the wish and desire of His Majesty's Government that the future government of these regions should be based upon the principle of the consent of the governed, and this policy has and will continue to have support of His Majesty's Government". As if that were not clear enough, at the end of the war the British and French governments issued a joint declaration stating that the war in the Middle East had been fought in order to achieve “the complete and definite emancipation of the [Arab] peoples and the establishment of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous populations”.

            However, not only had the British government been duplicitous concerning the future of Palestine and the rights of the Arab peoples to self-determination, it had also made entirely contrary declarations of support for the Zionist movement. In 1917, the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, issued a letter on behalf of the government, the infamous “Balfour Declaration”, declaring its support for the “Zionist aspirations” and the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. This Declaration was itself a response to a proposal from the Zionists. According to the Division for Palestinian Rights, established by the General Assembly of the United Nations: “The pivotal role of the Balfour Declaration in virtually every phase of the Palestinian issue cannot be exaggerated…It ultimately led to partition and to the problem as it exists today. Any understanding of the Palestine issue, therefore, requires some examination of this Declaration, which can be considered the root of the problem of Palestine.”

The New Statesman http://www.newstatesman.com/200709270051 commemorated the 90th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration by reprinting Peter Mansfield's essay, "Did we double-cross the Arabs?" from their 3 November 1967 issue.

           

The root cause of the chronic instability of the Middle East is an irresponsible act of statesmanship of half a century ago. When the Balfour Declaration was issued on 2 November 1917, in the form of a letter from the British Foreign Secretary to Lord Rothschild, saying that His Majesty's Government 'view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people', some members of the Lloyd George government forecast the storms ahead. Curzon, who had studied Zionist literature, said he 'could not share the optimistic views held concerning the future of Palestine' and he feared that the Declaration 'raised false expectations which could never be realised'. Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India and the only Jew in the Cabinet, regarded the Declaration as an anti-Semitic act because it would jeopardise the position of Jews throughout the world. He also believed that it broke promises made to the Arabs and violated the principle of self-determination. These opponents were easily overwhelmed by the confidence of the Declaration's three champions – Balfour, Cecil and Lloyd George himself.

            Their motives have been the subject of endless speculation. They seem to have been a peculiarly British blend of hard-headed realism and romantic idealism, strongly tinged with hypocrisy. The Declaration's sponsors were so vague about their reasons that they were driven to post hoc rationalisation in later years. Lloyd George told the House of Commons in 1936 that in 1917 the war was going so badly for the Allies that 'we came to the conclusion that it was vital that we should have the sympathies of the Jewish community'. But there is no evidence that they thought of this at the time.

            An important influence on the minds of the government was the Bible-reading Protestant belief in the return of the Jews to Zion on which men like Lloyd George (and the agnostic Churchill – another enthusiastic Zionist) had been nourished. Imperialist motives also played their part, but it was less the specific aims of balancing French influence in Syria with a pro-British community in Palestine which would also help to protect the Suez Canal (although this was in the back of their minds) than the general idea that the Jews, as civilised Europeans, would carry the white man's burden in an area where Britons were unlikely to do so themselves.

            Did they understand the implications of their action? Were they aware that the Zionist aim was to make Palestine a Jewish national state? Had they considered the reactions of the 'natives' – that is, the Arabs who formed more than 90 per cent of the population – and, if so, did they think they mattered? There are several pieces of evidence to help answer these questions. One is that the first draft of the Declaration prepared by the Zionist Organisation at Balfour's invitation foresaw the creation of an autonomous Jewish state under the protection of one of the Allied powers. It was after the strong protests of the Jewish Conjoint Committee, representing British Jewry, backed by Edwin Montagu, that the draft was changed to refer to the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, adding the words '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.' But, as Balfour was undoubtedly aware, a Jewish national state was what the Zionists wanted.

            In his efforts to persuade the war cabinet, Balfour said the Declaration 'did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish state, which was a matter of gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution.' But, being a philosopher more than a politician, Balfour could be unusually candid. In August 1919 he wrote a memorandum on Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia in which he said:

            The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation of Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission [the 1919 King-Crane Commission] has been through the form of asking what they are. The four great powers are committed to Zionism, and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices [sic] of 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

            He went on to say that in his opinion this was quite right but that he did not see how this policy could be harmonised with all the other declarations and pledges that had been made by the Allies. 'In fact, so far as Palestine is concerned, the powers have made no statement of fact that is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.'

            A rare and remarkable confession, Apart from the Allies' general pledges to set up national governments in the Middle East which would derive their authority 'from the free exercise and choice of the indigenous population', the British government had committed itself in two other ways. One was in the correspondence in 1915 between Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, and the Sherif Hussain of Mecca, the leader of the Arab revolt against the Turks, and the other was the so-called Sykes-Picot agreement, an Anglo-French understanding on the partition of the Middle East into great-power spheres of influence, which was published by the Russians, to the acute embarrassment of the Allies, after October 1917.

            Fountains of ink have flowed in the discussion of how far the British government was to blame for making these pledges which, though couched in ambiguous and evasive language, were undeniably incompatible with each other. Evidence which has recently come to light proves fairly conclusively that at least the Foreign Office believed that the Sherif Hussain had been promised that Palestine should be an independent Arab state.

            The question is whether this has any relevance to the present day. Israelis celebrate, while Arabs mourn, the anniversary of the Declaration, but does it mean any more than, say, the British and French attitudes to Agincourt? The answer is surely yes. It is sometimes said that, whatever the rights or wrongs of the past, the Zionists have taken Palestine, the Arabs have lost and should recognise the fact, just as Germany will have to forget about her eastern provinces. But the peculiar nature of Zionism invalidates this agreement. What the Arabs remember is that out of this small beginning – a brief letter from the British Foreign Secretary to a prominent English Jew – a 9-percent minority in Palestine grew in 30 years to establish its own exclusive and powerful nation-state on land which had been theirs for 1,500 years. They can be forgiven for regarding Zionism as expansionist by nature – especially when Zionists reassert their aim of gathering in the Diaspora of 12 million Jews. Possibly the Palestinian Arabs would have done better to settle for half a loaf by accepting almost any of the proposals for the partition of their country which were made during the British mandate. But would they? It is hard to imagine that Zionism would have been content to live within even narrower frontiers than it occupied last June. And Britain was incapable of seeing that it did.

***

Balfour Declaration

Foreign Office,

November 2nd, 1917

Dear Lord Rothschild,

            I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:

            "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".

            I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

            Yours sincerely

            Arthur James Balfour

***

Far from helping settle the Middle East conflict, the US and Europe are fuelling it with their contempt for democracy.

by Seumas Milne, November 1, 2007, The Guardian

There is, it seems, an unbridgeable gap between the western world’s apparent recognition of the dangers of Palestinian suffering and its commitment to do anything whatever to stop it. This week the collective punishment of the people of Gaza reached a new level, as Israel began to choke off essential fuel supplies to its one and a half million people in retaliation for rockets fired by Palestinian resistance groups. A plan to cut power supplies has only been put on hold till the end of the week by the intervention of Israel’s attorney general.

            Both moves come on top of the existing blockade of Gaza imposed by Israel since last year’s election of Hamas and the confiscation of hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes it is obliged to pass on as part of previous agreements. And instead of being restrained by the US or European Union, both have deepened the crisis by imposing their own sanctions and withdrawing aid. The result has, inevitably, been further huge increases in unemployment and poverty. But far from discouraging rocket attacks, they have risen sharply – though the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths has been running at more than 30 to one, compared with four to one at the height of the intifada five years ago. The UN’s senior official in Gaza, Karen Koning-Abu Zayd, yesterday branded Israel’s intensification of the Gaza siege as a violation of international law: despite its withdrawal two years ago, Israel continues to control all access to the Gaza Strip and remains the occupying power both legally and practically. Not that the situation is much better in the occupied West Bank. Despite the US and Israel’s fatal backing for the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and his emergency government of a non-existent state, Israeli demolitions, land seizures, settlement expansion, assassinations, armed incursions, segregated road-building and construction of the land-grabbing separation wall continue apace in the territory where Abbas’s nominal writ supposedly runs.

            There are now 563 checkpoints in the West Bank, squeezing this already constricted piece of land into apartheid-style cantons, and making free movement or normal economic activity entirely impossible. All this is in contravention of international law; much of it directly violates UN Security Council resolutions, such as resolution 446 against Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. But, whereas the occupied people face sanctions and international isolation, the occupiers pay no penalty at all. On the contrary, they are aided and armed to the hilt by the US and its allies.

            Given the speed at which Israel continues to create facts on the ground, it’s no surprise that even Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, warned a few days ago that the “window for a two-state solution” could be closing. But it is of course her government that has underpinned this takeover at every stage. And having preached democracy as the salvation of the Middle East, the US and its allies demonstrated what that meant in practice when it greeted the winners of the Palestinian elections with a political and economic boycott.

            Unless Hamas recognised Israel, renounced violence and signed up to agreements it had always opposed, the western powers insisted, the Palestinian electorate would be ignored. No such demands, needless to say, have been made of Israel. The US and Israel then went one step further, funding and arming a section of the defeated Fatah leadership in an attempt to overthrow Hamas’s administration. When that failed, the US encouraged Abbas to impose an unconstitutional administration of his own and blocked any power-sharing with Hamas, which is the precondition for Palestinian advance.

            Instead, the US is gearing up for a peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, from which Hamas is excluded and which almost nobody believes offers any prospect of real progress towards a settlement. Its main appeal to the Bush administration is perhaps that it can be seen to be doing something about the Israel-Palestine conflict at a time when it needs to corral its Arab allies for the coming confrontation with Iran. For the Palestinians, it’s maybe just as well that the Israeli government is resistant to any timetable for statehood – let alone serious negotiation on Jerusalem, refugees and final borders – as any agreement that such a weak leadership could now secure would not stand a chance of being accepted by its people.

            Already, Hamas and the other non-Fatah Palestinian parties are preparing to stage their own conference in Damascus to coincide with the Annapolis jamboree. Their aim is to challenge the right of Abbas, who has never had any of the legitimacy of Yasser Arafat, to represent the Palestinian people in negotiations over its future. While they were prepared to accept him as a negotiator for a national unity government, there will be no acceptance of deals made by a figure many Palestinians now regard as simply operating under US and Israeli licence.

            Nor should there be any interest in such a setup for anyone who wants to see a lasting settlement of the conflict. As in previous periods when political progress has been blocked, there are clear signs that pressures for a return to wider resistance are building up on the Palestinian side. The head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service, Yuval Diskin, said on Monday that he did not expect a new intifada if Annapolis failed because the Palestinian public was “exhausted and lacks leadership”. It’s true that any new upsurge in violence is likely to be different from in the past. But Palestinians are also well aware that it was the first intifada that led to the Oslo agreement, for all its weaknesses, and the second intifada that triggered Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza.

            Hamas has mostly held back from armed action against Israel in the past couple of years, though it has allowed attacks by others. That may be about to change. This week Israel’s defence minister, Ehud Barak, declared that “every passing day brings us closer to a broad operation in Gaza”, while Hamas leader Ahmad Nimr told a rally that the movement was now ready to “strike inside the heart of Israel, the occupation entity” if Israel did not stop its killings in Gaza. Hamas has a variety of options – including rocket attacks on Israeli cities from the West Bank over the much-vaunted security barrier – that could dramatically escalate the conflict. The wider international interest in a just settlement could not be more obvious.