Genocide Blog 45 – Balfour Declaration So Hasty due to Russian Revolution?

27.05.2024

Ram and I were huddling from the cold wind in Ragoo Lane, watching the fantastic Ilan Pappé YouTube talks at three different universities in the USA given earlier this month, where this Israeli historian explains the roots of the Zionist lobby way back in the early 1800s, when it had nothing to do with the Jewish community. This early history of Evangelical Zionism I knew nothing about.

Anyway, the Pappé talk made me want to understand how it would come about, by 1917, that we would see the signing of “The Balfour Declaration”, whereby the British state, via Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, would steal the Palestinians’ land, and give it away to the Jewish community of Europe and America, via a self-appointed “lider sosyo-kiltirel”, as we might call Lord Rothschild here today.

I then went on to read up found just how much the British had battled for, and got, other States “on board” before the actual Declaration.* The British insisted on written approval from the USA (Woodrow Wilson gave it) and France (Premier Ministre Ribot gave authority to his Foreign Minister to sign). Even the Vatican (via Benedict XV) gave its blessing. 

Britain could not go it alone. 

Just as today, Israel and the USA are battling for allies. They, more than ever, cannot do it alone. Even if they only get Nauru, Micronesia, Liberia. This is why our struggles count so much, in each and every country. Israel and the USA are losing allies every day – in the form of countries, political parties in each country, and even whole sections of peoples world-wide, including in their own states. It is time now for workers in each sector to support the workers of Palestine in their sector – health workers, journalists, NGO’s, teachers, students. Each group can organize a demonstration – no matter how small. Just let us know.

Back to the history.

This is one thing I learnt from Pappé’s lectures: The roots of Zionism, he explained, were firstly in Evangelical Christianity in the early 19th Century, in particular in American “Restorationists”, a strange descendant of the Crusaders in a way, that believed, inter alia, that god had a scheme planned whereby the messiah would return when the Jews “returned to Palestine” after which Christianity would triumph. This type of Zionism – still strong now, especially in the USA where it is the largest social base of today’s USA-Israel lobby – then gelled together with a second more powerful Zionist force: the geopolitical interests of the British Empire. The British Empire wanted control over the Middle East – remember cars had just been commercialized and all known fuels were under the soil of the Ottoman Empire – and also control over sea-routes Eastwards, like the Suez Canal. 

It was only much later, Pappé said, just before the 20th Century that this movement drew in some – a small minority – of the Jewish people of Europe, as one possible way to address anti-semitism. 

So, the Zionists, until then, had been Evangelicals plus those plotting for the British empire’s interests. 

So, now we get to how on earth this history would end up with Britain signing the infamous “Balfour Declaration” in 1917 towards the end of World War I, by which Britain would take over Palestine and “give” it to the European Jewish community leaders? 

I remembered, while listening to Professor Pappés riveting lectures, a documentary I saw once that showed how the British imperial state had badly needed a pretext to re-neg on a small part of the infamous 1916 Picot-Sykes Treaty with France, without jeopardizing the rest of this secret Pact made during the War and otherwise very much in Britain’s favour. (For the record, Sykes was a British, and Picot a French, negotiator, given the joint-task of carving up the spoils of war once the Allies – Britain, France, Russia – had defeated the Ottoman Empire.) This much-needed pretext was what led to the signature of the Balfour Declaration. The Picot-Sykes Treaty had also agreed, inter alia, that three Powers, not just France and Britain who got most of the spoils, but also Russia, would all three need to reach agreement on who it was who would control Jerusalem after the War. (Again, to me the echoes ring of the awful European Crusades – from back in the Middle Ages to nearly the year 1600.) 

But I still did not know what provoked the sudden signature of the somewhat absurd little letter from the British Foreign Affairs Minister to a Jewish dignitary scrawled on a scrap of ordinary paper and later grandly called “The Balfour Declaration”. And yet this part of “history” is, until today, an important link in events causing the genocide Israel is inflicting on the people of Palestine today. 

This scurrilous bit of paper, not even on a letterhead and without any seal, masquerades as “the document” whereby the great British State and its glorious Empire engaged itself first to grab Palestine and then to make it a colony for European Jews to move into. The document, no more than a paragraph, reads as follows: “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.”

This seemingly ludicrous “contract” between a British Minister and a businessman in the Jewish community refers to one people (British) who did not yet even control the land purporting to give this land that belonged to another people (Palestinians) to a third group of people (European Jewish people) who lived in many countries – on a seemingly random scrap of paper, happened apparently out of the blue. It is dated 2 November 1917, but was published in the Press only on 9 November. 

What happened in-between these two dates, in that one week, perhaps explains the hasty nature of the drafting of the scabrous little “Declaration”.

It was during the 1914-18 War (decades later called “World War I”) and the British were occupying Jerusalem at that very moment. And soon Britain, France and Tsarist Russia, according to the secret Treaty drawn up along the Sykes-Picot line the previous year, would be deciding together what to do with Palestine. Note the inclusion of Russia. Sykes-Picot read, in paraphrase of the colonial jargon, Galilee would controlled by France; Haifa and Acre by Britain, and the middle part, including Jerusalem, would come under ‘an international administration the form of which is to be decided upon’ through consultation with Allies, including importantly Tsarist Russia. 

So, I then went and looked up some actual dates. 

The Russian October Revolution (November in our Western calendar) that brought the Bolsheviks to power and Leon Trotsky to head Foreign Affairs, was on 7 November. Trotsky immediately set out to find copies in the desk drawers of the long-suspected secret Treaties Russia had signed up to, and immediately began discussions to make these grubby little agreements public, as had been promised during the months of the Revolution, since February 1917.

So, the date of the Bolsheviks taking power was 7 November. The Balfour Declaration was dated 2 November and was in the press on 9 November. 

The British secret services, very active in Russia at this time, would immediately have known about Trotsky’s discovery. In any case, the intentions of the Bolsheviks had been public throughout the year of 1917. They intended to publish the secret treaties, expose their pillage, and bring an end to the War. 

On 9 November, two days after the successful Russian Revolution, where the working class took power, Britain hurriedly published the Balfour Declaration. But, the letter was dated 2 November.

So, we begin to guess what happened.

Trotsky made the Treaties public two weeks later on 23 November 1917 after tabling them in the Russian Parliament the day before.

The timing explains the apparent “rushed” look the document signed by Arthur Balfour. 

Russia was no longer “Tsarist” Russia. The revolutionaries were in power. The British had no intention of consulting with revolutionary Russia on the future of Palestine. They did not even want the French in control of Palestine. In any case, after the 1916 Sykes-Picot Treaty, Mr. Sykes had been put in charge of squeezing France out of its Sykes-Picot rights in Palestine, and of getting a firm alliance with leading Jewish Zionists with a view to making a statement. Sykes plotted, at this point, with a Polish-Russian Zionist leader living in London called Nahum Sokolow. Sykes thus successfully outwitted France, and later grabbed control over the whole of Palestine. Sokolow actually got the French to sign a letter in June 1917, five months before the Balfour Declaration, saying they, the French, would agree to a “nationalité juive” for those “expelled so long ago”. The consent was signed by Cambon, the General Secretary at the French Foreign Affairs Ministry on the authority of the Prime Minister. By September 1917, US President Woodrow Wilson had given USA agreement in writing.

The Balfour Declaration was possible because of French and USA formal, secret, written agreement. 

Pope Benedict actually told Sokolow who lobbied him in person, too, that the plan for a Jewish State was “providential; God has willed it” (from verbatim notes taken by Sokolow).

All this to say, the plotting took months, before Britain got France and the USA to sign up. But the Russian Revolution rushed the final version.

What is important is that this kind of international scheming and plotting is the way, till today, that Israel, the USA and UK have worked, so that they act in unison to support Israel and then drag in other countries. Their collusion has fortunately just about reached its sell-by date. They don’t know what they are doing except wreaking death and destruction on the Palestinian people.

But, meanwhile, the costs for humanity are too high. And right now, it is the Palestinians who are paying these costs, in terms of actual lives, as well as injuries, livelihoods, and their living environment. We must work to put an end to this kind of foul collusion that will oppress us all forever, if we do not. 

Look at the most recent example of this kind of imperialist collusion: 

Remember how, when the ICJ announced that there was “plausible” genocide in Gaza, Israel tried to change the subject by spreading a scurrilous little rumour that 12 UN workers employed by UNRWA had been involved in the Hamas incursion of 7 October, how without any proof, without any specification of what was being referred to, a list of 17 major Western countries managed to skip over all their usual bureaucratic inertia and immediately cut their contributions to UNRAW, the lifeline the UN owes Palestinians for taking 76 years to create a Palestinian State? 

The USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Iceland, The Netherlands, Finland, Italy and even Japan all just canceled their funding when Israel was imposing starvation on the Palestinians of Gaza. 

These supposedly dignified, sovereign countries had all pre-planned lock-step de-funding loaded and ready to fire. They did it like a flock of pre-programmed little machines. This was not through the power of Israel. It was through the power of the USA. The USA cut its aid. This automatically set off a list of other countries to cut their aid. There must be agreement to permits such a thing. And it must be secret. It is probably in writing somewhere, too.

And now, each of these countries, has gradually realized the utter folly of their lockstep cruelty, and once again begun to pay their dues. Only the USA and UK remain adamant. 

Even the big boss, the USA, has capitulated in a devious way, paying some contributions to UNRWA through an ONG of some kind. The USA and UK are left looking both ridiculous and cruel.

And the Israeli State is now in the process of declaring UNRWA, wait for it, “a terrorist organization”. It is just unbelievable what we see when we look.

Lindsey Collen

for LALIT

*Interesting for background on Balfour Declaration written 100 years after the event:

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