J.A. Miller: 90th Anniversary
of the Balfour Declaration
By J.A. Miller
Special to PalestineChronicle.com
It becomes, therefore, specially important to foster and
develop any strongly-marked Jewish movement which leads
directly away from these fatal [socialist] associations. And
it is here that Zionism has such a deep significance for the
whole world at the present time….The struggle which is now
beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little
less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people. Winston Churchill, 1920
They own the [Holy] land, just the mere land, and that’s all
they do own; but it was our folks, our Jews and Christians,
that made it holy, and so they haven’t any business to be
there defiling it. It’s a shame and we ought not to stand it a
minute. We ought to march against them and take it away from
them. – Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad, 1894
The Dual Purpose Declaration
Some time ago I attended a workshop on the Palestine conflict
held in a nearby Protestant church. You might know the sort
of church; a liberal American congregation with a majority of
aging, white parishioners who gamely troop off to construct
community centers in Central America or cluster bedraggled and
clutching flickering candles in ever-diminishing numbers at
anti-war vigils.
For the opening act the organizers trundled out an employee
from a nearby institution of higher learning who delivered an
Introduction to the History of the Conflict in sepulchral
tones. When he had done with his twenty minutes of erudition,
the professor smirked round at the audience and opened the
floor for questions.
An elderly Palestinian woman in the
audience stood up with considerable dignity and asked why he
had dwelt on the secret Sykes-Picot agreement to divide
imperial Middle Eastern spoils between Britain and France but
neglected any mention of the Balfour Declaration which is
regarded by Palestinians as the founding document of the crime
against them. His flustered answer came apologetically vague
but the damage had been done. The timeline as delivered no
doubt retained its Balfour-less authority with the audience by
virtue of the subtle relief provided by the insinuation that
at least Roman Catholics shared some of the blame.
Alas the good professor is not alone in regarding the Balfour
Declaration as insignificant. A majority of the learned
interlocutors of the “problem” tend to spin Balfour’s promise
as deriving from the exigencies of WWI or simply evidence of a
pottering British eccentricity.
Imagine those silly Brits
thinking they could give away land not belonging to them: What
a good joke! But by trivializing or censoring Balfour yet
another layer of cover to the illegality of Israel is
provided, a service long and eagerly rendered gratis by much
of western academia. It is instructive to note that the
proclamation establishing British Mandate rule in Palestine as
ratified by the League of Nations in 1922 included every
single syllable of the Balfour declaration and nary a one from
Sykes-Picot.
We are now staring down the 91st year since Balfour put the
West’s larcenous intentions in writing. And although my local
representative of the American intelligentsia expunged Balfour
from his narrative the Arabs were perfectly aware from the
outset that Bloody Balfour — as he was known to the Irish who
had felt the sting of his lash — was no charming British lord
but rather the author of a singular colonial document of cold
and malign intent.
During Balfour’s 1925 tour of Egypt ,
Palestine and Syria demonstrations, strikes and editorial
denunciation hounded him every step of the way and after
spending only a single day in Damascus in which he dared not
to leave his hotel room his Lordship was bundled hastily and
in secret out of town ahead of a furious citizenry.[1]
The timing of his declaration on November 2, 1917 — those
early heady days of the Russian Revolution — indicates Balfour
certainly had red reduction on his mind. Indeed, Zionists both
Christian and Jewish had long flogged their ideology as a
remedy for the disturbing Jewish affinity for socialism. As
Herzl made the rounds in Europe searching for a patron he not
only adopted the anti-Semitic line that the Jews were the
“problem” but eagerly offered up Zionism as the solution
explaining as he did to anyone who would listen “that we were
taking the Jews away from the revolutionary parties”.[2]
Marketing their ideology as revolution lite the early Zionists
engineered an ingenious bait-and-switch operation by veiling
its messianic/imperialist impetus behind the veneer of a faux
secularist labor movement in order to co-opt and divert Jewish
revolutionary energies while simultaneously pandering to the
anti-Semites. In Palestine the relentless squeezing out of
any residual impulse for worker solidarity was embodied in the
ominous Zionist slogan “the conquest of labor” which perfectly
complemented the equally violent and exclusionary goal of land
“redemption”.
Not long after the Balfour declaration was promulgated, that
well-known warlord Winston Churchill put it rather more
plainly in the Sunday Herald opinion piece quoted above which
article was accompanied by a grainy photo of a morose and
bejowled Churchill inspecting the 4th Hussars at
Aldershot.[3] Although Balfour rushed the declaration into
print just as the Russian revolution was triumphing, the
colonies were never far from his sights. In addition to
undercutting socialism Balfour hoped to insert a reliable
settler European base in Palestine thereby taking up Herzl on
his offer of Jewish readiness to "form a part of a wall of
defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against
barbarism". [4] Thus it was that Herzl first introduced the
wall motif which was to become so integral to Zionism, a motif
later expanded ferrously and ferociously by Jabotinsky and
ultimately made tangible in the concrete monstrosity now
strangling Palestine.
At the same time Churchill was professing concern for Jewish
souls he was busily extinguishing Muslim ones as he presided
over the very first aerial bombardment of a colonial rebellion
in his role as titular head of the newly-minted Ministry of
Air and War. The resistance subjected to this first test of
airpower’s efficacy was led by the Somali poet-warrior and
dervish commander Muhammad Ibn ‘Abdallah Hassan a.k.a. the
“Mad Mullah” regarded by the British in those days in much the
same manner Americans regard Hassan Nasrallah or Muqtada Sadr
today. The Mullah had inflicted a humiliating defeat on the
British at Dulmadoba in eastern Somalia in 1913 in which the
British commander was killed. Hassan impudently memorialized
the event in a poem entitled “The Death of Richard Corfield”:
O Corfield! You are a traveler who
Will not stay long here below
You will follow the path where there is no rest
You are among the denizens of Hell
After twenty years of resistance however, Hassan’s lightlyarmed forces proved no match for airpower even in its nascent
form. A lethal combination of British aerial bombardment and
smallpox decimated the Somali resistance by 1920. As one of
the pilots who flew in imperialism’s maiden bombing run
laconically observed, the airplane was a “convenient weapon to
bomb the old villain out of hiding place”.[5] The Somali
experiment was so murderously successful that an enthusiastic
Churchill advocated that using airpower to subdue rebellion in
a newly conquered Iraq arguing that it would allow a cutback
British ground troops by more than 80%.
Spurred by
Churchill’s cost-effectiveness analysis, an RAF air campaign
was launched and 97 tons of bombs were dropped killing 9,000
Iraqis.[6]. The airborne spirit of Churchill today animates
the vicious American and Zionist air campaigns in Iraq ,
Palestine and Lebanon . Although nearly a century apart, in
each instance the goal was to remotely impose destruction,
misery and discipline upon an obstreperous Islam.
I am Cyrus! I am Cyrus!
Balfour’s two-pronged imperial goal of crushing impetus for
social and economic equity from within and bludgeoning
indigenous resistance in the colonies succeeded even beyond
his Lordship’s wildest dreams. The spectacular and continuous
success of his Declaration is due, I submit, to the innovation
contained within it, one which has immeasurably enhanced its
lethality and indeed ensured its longevity in spite of all
odds. And that innovation is the introduction of Old
Testamentary religion as justification for the crimes under
consideration.
Each year that has passed since that dark November day in 1917
has seen the minor and crack-brained ideology of Zionism —
with only a few million official adherents worldwide –going
from strength to strength while other ideologies with millions
more followers have withered and died leaving not a wrack
behind. This persistence of Zionism in spite of its brutal
racism has puzzled many.
In addition to a near universal
tolerance of its crimes from a plurality of Western
governments Zionism has also enjoyed almost complete immunity
from effective assault by the left. The continued silence of
western progressives in the face of the Iraq and Lebanon wars
– let alone the eighty-year war in Palestine – are I submit
directly related to Old Testament-based religious Zionism that
originated not with Theodore Herzel in 1896 but in Protestant
Europe centuries ago.
Like the Balfourian template, Zionism’s success can be
attributed not only to its proven abilities in combating
secularism and social/racial/economic equity that it has
executed with a single-minded dedication as it assisted the
West in its domination of the Muslim – or in the case of
Apartheid South Africa – the African Other. The other less
understood but even more powerful component of Zionism’s
staying power derives from the ideology’s entirely Christian
origins, a subject on which I have expanded in some detail
elsewhere.[7] Anyone who has labored in western progressive
and antiwar movements has met the endemic reflexive
gatekeeping by the membership on behalf of Israel’s crimes.
Such near formulaic reflexivity derives, I believe, directly
from a long, historic Protestant regard of Palestine as
covenanted property owned not only by Jews but also by
Protestants as well. And here I am not speaking about the
easily identified and excoriated rapturist/dispensationalist
crowd but rather what Hilton Oberzinger has identified as the
less understood and therefore entirely unexamined Zionist
ideological current that
…goes far beyond the narrower terrain of Likud politicians and
conservative televangelists, an affiliation that involves
broader, more liberal trends within Protestantism and Zionism,
as well as more secular currents within Western nationalist
discourse. [8]
Although Zionism’s zealousness in furthering the forces of
reaction is unexcelled, the left has been unable to combat it
precisely because of these origins and the deeply ingrained,
almost subconscious belief held by many in the west — avowed
atheists included — that Palestine is somehow legal property
of both Jews and Christians. Martin Buber, so admired by many
on the left, minced no words in this regard: “Where a command
and a faith are present, in certain historical situations
conquest need not be robbery.” [9] Zionism’s vigor has been
ensured by this very fusion of larceny and religion. As the
end-product of a country that produced the world’s original
Christian Zionists in the 17th century, Balfour finally
succeeded in turning religious formula into official imperial
policy.
Hundreds of years of Old Testament theological education
overlays nearly all of western Christianity and its influence
in enabling Israel to continue in its death’s head trajectory
must not be underestimated.
Mark Twain understood this
dynamic and succinctly sums it up in Tom Sawyer Abroad when he
has Tom — exasperated by Huck’s inability to grasp the concept
of land theft in the name of religion — state loftily: “[You
can’t] try to reason out a thing that’s pure theology by the
laws that protect real estate”!
Indeed you cannot as Bill
Clinton would agree. The ex-President pulled an all-nighter on
Sept. 12, 1993, poring over the retributive and genocidal Book
of Joshua in preparation for his speech on the occasion of the
“historic” Rabin-Arafat handshake. [10] Like a pair of
sanctimonious parsons, both Rabin and Clinton quoted the Bible
at Arafat in their respective speeches the next day, putting
the Palestinians on notice yet again that not only would they
never relinquish joint Jewish/Protestant covenantal claim of
their ownership stake in Palestinian real estate but moreover
that they had in hand the Biblical paperwork to back it up.
The egoism and violence engendered by using Old Testamentary
justification for crime cannot be underestimated. Perhaps the
finest example of this particular sort of madness was
exhibited by none other than Harry Truman who in 1953 was
introduced at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York as
the “man who helped create the state of Israel ”.
In as
splendid a display of egomania suffused with biblical
intoxication you could ever wish to see, an indignant Truman
is reported to have shouted, “What do you mean ‘helped
create’? I am Cyrus! I am Cyrus!” [11] As a beneficiary of
an English public school education steeped in biblical and
ancient history no doubt Balfour fantasized himself in much
the same role – or perchance in one even more Exalted — as he
penned his declaration that has in keeping with its author’s
nickname spilled so much blood for so long.
Notes:
1. al-Ahram Weekly Online, A Balfour Curse, October 26 –
November 1, 2000.
2. See Chapter 1 of Lenni Brenner’s excellent Zionism in the
Age of Dictators, 1983
3. Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920, p. 5
4. Theodore Herzl, The Jewish State, 1896.
Ever eager to
portray Zionists “pioneers” as naïve idealists, neo-Zionist
Uri Avnery insists that Herzl was merely thinking of a
“metaphoric wall” in The Mother of all Pretexts, Counterpunch,
October 16, 2007
5. Said Samatar, Sarbeeb:The Art of Oblique Communication in
Somali Culture, June 2005
6. Jonathan Glancey, Our Last Occupation, The Guardian, April
2003
7. J.A. Miller, Madness and Monotheism, State of Nature ,
Spring 2006; Home Court Advantage, Dissident Voice, August 3,
2006
8. Hilton Oberzinger, In the Shadow of “God’s Sun-Dial”: The
Construction of American Christian Zionism and the Blackstone
Memorial. SEHR, Vol. 5, Issue 1
9. Martin Buber, On Zion:The History of an Idea, 1974, p. 146
10. Michael Prior. The Bible and Colonialism, 1997, p.40
11. Moshe Davis, With Eyes on Zion , 1977, p. 25