Arthur Balfour’s strange letter to Lord Rothschild

and France issued a new Anglo-French declaration on November 7, 1918, four days before the European Armistice ending the war with Germany. The new declaration insisted that Britain and France were fi ghting for ‘the complete and defi nite emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks, and the establishment of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous populations.’6 That noble result was not to happen. Once the solemn pledges of Versailles had been signed, Britain, with its approximately 1-million-strong military force in the region, established its military supremacy over the French area of the Middle East as well.

By September 30, 1918, France had agreed to British terms for creating what were called ‘zones of temporary military occupation.’ Under this agreement, the British would occupy Turkish Palestine, under what was called Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, along with the other parts of the British sphere.

Recognizing the French inability to deploy suffi cient troops into the designated French areas after the exhaustion of war in Europe, Britain generously offered to act as the overall supreme military and administrative guardian, with General Sir Edmund Allenby, commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, as the de facto military dictator over the entire Arab Middle East after 1918, including the French sphere. In a private discussion in London in December, 1918, British Prime Minister Lloyd George told France’s Clemenceau that Britain wanted France to attach the ‘Mosul to Iraq, and Palestine from Dan to Beersheba under British control.’ In return France was said to have been assured of the remaining claims to Greater Syria, as well as a half share in the exploitation of Mosul oil, and a guarantee of British support in the postwar period in Europe, should France ever have to ‘respond’ to German action on the Rhine.7 This private understanding set the stage for later events in a profoundly tragic manner, as we shall see.

ARTHUR BALFOUR’S STRANGE LETTER TO LORD ROTHSCHILD

But postwar British designs for redrawing the military and economic map of the Ottoman Empire included an extraordinary new element— all the more extraordinary in that many of the most infl uential advocates of the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, including Lloyd George, were British ‘gentile Zionists’.8

On November 2, 1917, in the darkest days of the Great War, with Russia’s war effort on behalf of the Anglo-French alliance collapsing under economic chaos and the Bolshevik seizure of power, and with the might of America not yet fully engaged in Europe as a combatant on the side of Britain, Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, sent the following letter to Walter Lord Rothschild, representative of the English Federation of Zionists:

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 for 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.9

The letter formed the basis on which a post-1919 British League of Nations mandate over Palestine was established under whose guiding hand territorial changes of global consequence were to be wrought. The almost casual reference to ‘existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ by Balfour and the cabinet was a reference to the more than 85 per cent of the population who were Palestinian Arabs; in 1917, less than 1 per cent of the inhabitants of Palestine were Jewish.

It is notable that the letter was an exchange between two close friends. Both Balfour and Lord Rothschild were members of an emerging imperialist faction in Britain, which sought to create an enduring global empire, one based on more sophisticated methods of social control.

Also notable is the fact that Lord Rothschild spoke, not as head of any international organization of Jewry, but rather as a member of the English Federation of Zionists, whose president at the time was Chaim Weizmann. Rothschild money had essentially created that organization, and had subsidized the emigration to Palestine of hundreds of Jews, fl eeing Poland and Russia since 1900, through the Jewish Colonisation Association of which Lord Rothschild was