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A Century of War
president for life. Britain was generous in offering lands far away from her shores, while in the same period she was far from open-armed in welcoming persecuted Jewish refugees to her own shores. But more relevant than the evident hypocrisy in the Balfour– Rothschild exchange was the British Great Game, which lay behind the Balfour note. It is not insignificant that the geographical location for the new British-sponsored Jewish homeland lay in one of the most strategic areas along the main artery of the enlarged post-1914 British Empire, in a sensitive position along the route to India as well as in relation to the newly won Arab petroleum lands of Ottoman Turkey. The settlement of a Jewish minority under British protectorate in Palestine, argued Balfour and others in London, would give London strategic possibilities of enormous importance. It was, to say the least, a cynical ploy on the part of Balfour and his circle. BALFOUR BACKS THE NEW CONCEPT OF EMPIRE Beginning approximately in the early 1890s, a group of British elites, primarily from the privileged colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, formed what was to become the most influential policy network in Britain over the next half century and more. The group denied its existence as a formal group, but its footprints can be found around the establishment of a new journal of empire, the Round Table, founded in 1910. The group argued that a more subtle and efficient system of global empire was required to extend the effective hegemony of AngloSaxon culture over the next century. At the time of its inception, this ‘Round Table’ group as it was sometimes called, was explicitly anti-German and pro-Empire. Writing in the Round Table in August 1911, three years before Britain declared war against Germany, the influential Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) declared: There are at present two codes of international morality—the British or Anglo-Saxon and the continental or German. Both cannot prevail. If the British Empire is not strong enough to be a real influence for fair dealing between nations, the reactionary standards of the German bureaucracy will triumph, and it will then only be a question of time before the British Empire itself is victimized by an international ‘hold-up’ on the lines of the Agadir incident. Unless the British people are strong enough to make it
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