A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  In the twelve centuries or more that have passed since the Arab conquest, Palestine has virtually dropped out of history… In economics as in politics, Palestine lay outside the main stream of the world’s life. In the realm of thought, in science or in letters, it made no contribution to modern civilization. 64

  Some may argue that by the 1930s the issue had already become politicized and therefore that the historical truth cannot be ascertained from pronouncements from that decade. But no such objection can possibly apply to eyewitness accounts of visitors to the Holy Land from a century earlier. Here, for example, is the conclusion of Swiss scholar Felix Bovet, who visited Palestine in 1858 and reported on the state of civilization he found there:

  The Christians who conquered the Holy Land never knew how to keep it, and it was never anything to them other than a battlefield and a graveyard. The Saracens [i.e., Arabs] who took it from them left it as well and it was captured by the Ottoman Turks. The latter… turned it into a wasteland in which they seldom dare to tread without fear. The Arabs themselves, who are its inhabitants, cannot be considered but temporary residents. They pitched their tents in its grazing fields or built their places of refuge in its ruined cities. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers to the land, they never became its masters. The desert wind that brought them hither could one day carry them away without their leaving behind them any sign of their passage through it. 65

  When Edward Robinson, Claude Conder, and the other archaeologists first toured the land, they could identify the ancient Jewish sites with relative ease because the Arabs usually had not bothered to give them new Arabic names, leaving the original Hebrew names in place (albeit slightly modified to be more easily pronounced in Arabic). The Hebrew names the explorers found virtually intact included: Jeremiah’s birthplace of Anatoth (Antha), the Maccabee battlefields at Lebonah (Luban) and Beth Horon (Beth Ur), the site of Bar Kochba’s last battle at Betar (Batir), the site of the tabernacle at Shiloh (Seilun), Arad (Tel Urad), Ashkelon (Asqalan), Beersheba (Bir es Saba), Benei Brak (Ibn Ibreiq), Beth Shean (Beisan), Beth Shemesh (’Ain Shams), Adoraim (Dura), Eshtamoa (Es-Samu), and hundreds of others. 66 In fact, in the twelve centuries of the Arab presence in Palestine before the return of the Jews in modern times, the Arabs built only a single new town—Ramleh. 67 These obvious facts moved Sir George Adam Smith, author of The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, to write in 1891, “Nor is there any indigenous civilization in Palestine that could take the place of the Turkish except that of the Jews who… have given to Palestine anything it ever had of value to the world.” 68

  Hence, when the world leaders at Versailles weighed the question of competing Jewish and Arab claims, they were justifiably not concerned with any “Palestinian” national claim. No Arab leader at Versailles (or in Palestine, for that matter) came forward to present such a claim. Headed by Feisal, son of the Sherif of Mecca and later to become King Feisal of Iraq, the Arab delegation was preoccupied with securing independence for an Arab state that they envisioned would include present-day Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula. In fact, they saw the Zionists as potentially useful allies. In January 1919, a month before the opening of the Versailles Conference, Feisal signed an agreement with Chaim Weizmann calling for “the closest possible collaboration” between the Jewish and Arab peoples “in the development of the Arab State and Palestine,” and stating that the constitution of Palestine should “afford the fullest guarantees for carrying into effect the British Government’s [Balfour] Declaration of 2nd November, 1917,” and that “all necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale.” In return, the Zionist Organization agreed to “use its best efforts to assist the Arab State in providing the means for developing the natural resources and economic possibilities thereof.” The Arab and Jewish peoples also undertook to “act in complete accord… before the Peace Congress.” In March, Feisal wrote to Felix Frankfurter, who was then a member of the American delegation: “Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper.… We will wish the Jews a hearty welcome home.” (These documents are reproduced in full in Appendixes A and B.)

  It should be noted—again, contrary to present claims—that both the British and the League of Nations knew full well that some of the local Palestinian Arabs were resisting the arrangement whereby a small part of the Middle East was to be excluded from Arab sovereignty for the purpose of creating a Jewish home. Full civil rights had been guaranteed to them, and since Palestine contained not much more than 5 percent of the millions of Arabs whom Britain had just liberated from the Ottoman Empire, Lord Balfour insisted that a compromise such as Feisal’s was perfectly fair. To Balfour, Zionism was “rooted in age-old 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.” 69 The Versailles signatories concurred, granting the Mandate over Palestine to Britain at the San Remo Conference in April 1920—after agitators from Damascus inspired violent outbreaks in Jerusalem, in which six Jews were beaten to death and hundreds more were wounded. Significantly, the Palestinian Arab rioters demanded the incorporation of Palestine into an independent Syria. 70

  British policy clearly expressed the consensus that there were two peoples, Arab and Jewish, and that both would receive their due. In December 1917, immediately after the signing of the Balfour Declaration, Assistant Foreign Secretary Lord Robert Cecil had proclaimed his country’s policy simply: “Our wish is that Arabian countries shall be for the Arabs, Armenia for the Armenians, Judea for the Jews.” 71

  Looking back on the results of Versailles years later, Lloyd George was outraged by the claim that the Arabs had somehow been treated unfairly in Palestine and elsewhere:

  No race has done better out of the fidelity with which the Allies redeemed their promises to the oppressed races than the Arabs. Owing to the tremendous sacrifices of the Allied Nations, and more particularly of Britain and her Empire, the Arabs have already won independence in Iraq, Arabia, Syria, and Trans-Jordania, although most of the Arab races fought throughout the War for the Turkish oppressors…. [In particular] the Palestinian Arabs fought for Turkish rule. 72

  Similarly, the South African Jan Smuts, a member of the British War Cabinet who was actively involved in the discussions behind the Balfour Declaration and the Versailles Treaty, recalled the views of the British Cabinet in deciding to favor a Jewish homeland in Palestine:

  It was naturally assumed that large-scale immigration of Jews into their historic homeland could not and would not be looked upon as a hostile gesture to the highly favoured Arab people… [who,] largely as a result of British action, came better out of the Great War than any other people. 73

  It therefore came as no surprise that Balfour formally wrote down these sentiments on November 2, 1917, in his letter to the British Zionist Federation via Lord Rothschild: Britain favorably viewed Jewish aspirations for a Jewish National Home in Palestine, aspirations that were commonly known to include the establishment of a Jewish majority there and the ultimate administration of the country by the Jew. This letter became known as the Balfour Declaration:

  His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors 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.

  As for the Arab inhabitants, the Balfour Declaration specifically stipulated that they should enjoy “civil and religious rights” in Palestine. It was believed that there was nothing wrong with an Arab minority living among the Jews so long as their individual rights were guaranteed, which is precise
ly what the declaration required.

  When the League of Nations charged Britain with the Mandate for Palestine at the San Remo Conference in 1920, it did so based on Britain’s pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration of 1917, which it incorporated into the language of the Mandate. Thus, the Mandate dictated, “The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.” It also called for facilitating Jewish immigration and “close settlement by Jews on the land.” (The full text of the Mandate can be found in Appendix C.)

  Britain felt justified in making such an arrangement because it had just liberated the Arabs from four centuries of Turkish rule and had given them immense lands for their national self-expression. It also felt that the Jews deserved special recognition for their loyalty and service in World War I. Many Jews had fought in the Allied armies and thus had contributed to the liberation from Ottoman rule of Arab and Jew alike. But the Arabs had done practically nothing to shake off the Turks (most Arabs and, as Lloyd George noted, Palestinian Arabs in particular, had supported the Moslem Turks), with the exception of a few forays against the Hejaz railroad line made by irregular bands led by T. E. Lawrence, who later did much to promote and inflate their (and especially his) contribution to the war effort. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had served in the Allied armies, 74 the special Jewish Battalions formed by the Zionist leadership and led by Colonel John Henry Patterson made a tangible contribution to the British campaigns against the Turks in Samaria, Galilee, and Transjordan. *

  Thus, both as a reward for services rendered and as a recognition of historical Jewish national rights, British policy was clearly committed to the historical Jewish claim to Palestine. It was British statesmen who introduced this Jewish right into the wording of the Mandate at the League of Nations—not a difficult task, since this right was then widely recognized. In fact, the wording of the League of Nations Mandate did not give the Jews the right to the land, but recognized a right understood to already exist, stating that “recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” It was possible to extend such recognition only because educated men believed that the Jewish right to the land had been granted to the Jewish people by history and by the unceasing yearning of the Jews to be restored to their national life.

  The recognition of this right was most eloquently championed in 1921 by Lloyd George’s one-time protégé, Winston Churchill:

  It is manifestly right that the scattered Jews should have a national centre and a national home to be re-united, and where else but in Palestine, with which for three thousand years they have been intimately and profoundly associated? We think it will be good for the world, good for the Jews, good for the British Empire, but also good for the Arabs who dwell in Palestine… they shall share in the benefits and progress of Zionism.

  Churchill was a firm believer that the Jews could build their home in Palestine while benefiting the Arab residents. He told Arabs who petitioned him to keep the Jews from buying land in Palestine and settling there, “No one has harmed you…. The Jews have a far more difficult task than you. You only have to enjoy your own possession; but they have to create out of the wilderness, out of the barren places, a livelihood for the people they bring in.” Attacked in the House of Commons for granting the Jews concessions for hydroelectric projects on the Jordan River, Churchill said:

  I am told the Arabs would have done it for themselves. Who is going to believe that? Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps toward the irrigation and electrification of Palestine. They would have been quite content to dwell—a handful of philosophic people—in the wasted sun-scorched plains, letting the waters of the Jordan continue to flow unbridled and unharnessed into the Dead Sea. 75

  As noted, these sympathetic attitudes toward Zionism were widely shared on both sides of the Atlantic. It therefore came as no surprise that the United States soon recognized the Balfour Declaration. It was accepted in June 1922 by both Houses of Congress, then in September by President Warren G. Harding, who signed a bill endorsing it.

  So it was that in 1922, after decades of political activism, Zionism had reached a peak of international appeal. Its cause was widely viewed as just, its leaders were admired and respected, and its basic goal of establishing a Jewish homeland on both sides of the Jordan River was increasingly accepted worldwide. True, the home for the Jews was to be of modest proportions, much of it covered by swamp and sand and all of it exposed to an unforgiving sun. But it was empty and roomy enough, and it would do. Had not their ancestors tilled the soil of Gilead east of the Jordan, built terraced vineyards in Judea in the west, fished in the Sea of Galilee to the north, and set off to sea from Jaffa on the coast? Their descendants would do all that and more. As Herzl had envisaged it in his novel Altneuland (“Old-New Land”), the Jewish state would revive ancient traditions alongside its thriving science and technology, creating, precisely as George Eliot had foretold, a republic “carrying the culture and sympathy of every great nation in its bosom” and bringing “the brightness of Western freedom amid the despotism of the East.” In 1922, despite the ominous clouds gathering over the Jewish community of Europe, the creation of a safe haven and a home seemed imminent. The Jewish future had not seemed brighter for two millennia.

  2

  THE BETRAYAL

  But it was not to be. Even before Britain was granted the Mandate to build a Jewish National Home at the San Remo Conference in 1920, forces within the British imperial establishment had started working to dissolve Britain’s commitment to the promise of Versailles. By the time the council of the League of Nations confirmed the Mandate in 1922, the will of British policymakers to actually implement the Balfour Declaration had begun to evaporate.

  Under its changed policy, Britain turned its back on the promises it had undertaken in the Balfour Declaration. What had been regarded as obvious moral truths and obligations before the British had formally received the Mandate were now quickly discarded as policies unsuited to the moment. Britain tore off Transjordan from the Jewish National Home in 1922: With one stroke of the pen, it lopped off nearly 80 percent of the land promised the Jewish people, closing this area to Jews for the remainder of the century (see Map 4). It sanctioned the entry into Palestine of Abdullah, the Hashemite chieftain from Mecca, titled him emir, and created a new country called Transjordan (now Jordan), which to this day suffers from the artificiality of its birth. At the end of the 1920s, claiming that the settlement of Jews had “provoked” anti-Jewish rioting, Britain issued a White Paper that severely restricted Jewish immigration and the purchase of land by Jews. By the eve of World War II, after successive White Papers, the British had choked off Jewish immigration almost entirely and had limited Jewish land purchase to a tiny fraction of the country, prompting President Franklin Roosevelt to declare to Secretary of State Cordell Hull: “I was at Versailles, and I know that the British made no secret of the fact they promised Palestine to the Jews. Why are they now reneging on their promise?” 1

  Why, indeed? Where had this shift come from? What political forces were able to drive the most powerful nation on earth to unilaterally abandon the commitment it had made to a national home for the Jewish people—leaving the Jews homeless and helpless just as Hitler’s machine of destruction was rolling across Europe?

  The government of Lloyd George had adopted the Balfour Declaration and pursued it at Versailles for two reasons not dissimilar to those that many Americans have used for supporting Israel today. Lloyd George believed that British support for the Jewish National Home was morally correct because of the justice of the Jewish cause. But he had also advocated supporting Zionism for a second reason, no less important: that Zionism was in Britain’s own interest. Lloyd George believed (as had the Kais
er before him) that the Jews were a power in the world to be reckoned with, and that an alliance with a Jewish nation in Palestine, situated by the crucial Suez Canal and straddling the land route to India, would be a lasting asset to Britain. 2 He was therefore convinced that strengthening the Jewish people in Palestine would in fact strengthen the British people and ultimately the Western values of which he believed Britain was the guardian.

  The shift to an anti-Zionist Britain over the course of the next few years entailed a dual change in British governmental opinion. British policymakers came to believe, first, that an alliance with the Arabs, rather than with the Jews, was in Britain’s interest. Second, since many Arab leaders rejected Feisal’s diplomacy and opposed the settlement of Jews in Palestine, British officials came to believe that it would be unjust to override local Arab opinion and support Zionism. Fixed during the interwar period, these British positions on both interest and justice have retained their vitality well into the second half of the century. Laying the foundations for a remarkable readiness to accept even the most exaggerated claims of later Arab propaganda as truth, they have had immense influence in determining Western, and most recently American, policy toward Israel up to our own time. It is therefore necessary to understand the genesis of these beliefs and to gauge how well the policies based on them actually served the causes of justice and interest.

  Clearly, the rejection of the Jewish National Home was not the policy of either Balfour or Lloyd George. Rather, it came from the imperial calculations of the officials of the British War Office and Foreign Office, who grabbed much of the Arab world from the Ottomans during World War I. The idealism of Wilson and Balfour was fine for wartime propaganda, but once Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Arabia were actually in British hands, someone had to govern them—and that someone was a small army of rather clannish Foreign Office “Arabists,” who had spent their lives learning to speak Arabic, moving about places such as Cairo and Khartoum, and becoming intoxicated with the romance of the “noble” Bedouin. Dreaming of a vast pro-British Arab federation from the Sudan to Iraq (creating a continuous overland empire from South Africa to India), these men had spent the war fighting zealously for the “liberation” of the Arabs. They had schemed tirelessly to manufacture Arab “leaders” who could bring the scattered and chronically divided Arab tribes of the Ottoman Empire into an alliance with Britain—and with one another. Strangely, these Arabists seem to have been untroubled by the fact that hundreds of thousands of Arabs were fighting and dying for the Moslem Ottomans and that only the most lavish “subsidies” and the most exorbitant promises of future independent Arab kingdoms could pry a few thousand disunited Bedouin raiders away to side with the Western Allies.