Today, November 2nd is the 107th anniversary of one of the darkest days in the bloody history of the British Empire. For exactly 107 years ago today the then British Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour, a Christian Zionist Lord wrote a personal letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, a Jewish Zionist Lord, in which he gifted him Palestine as a ‘homeland’ for the Jews.
The fact that Palestine at the time was not under British rule, that they had no deed to it or mandate and had no right to gift it to other people, did not bother his Lordship. Palestine, at the time, had been an Arab country for many centuries, populated by Arab Muslims and Christians (95%) with a small minority of Jews (5%) Yet, despite the caveat in Lord Balfour’s letter which reads, “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, all 95% of the population, Lord Balfour and his peers and Zionist Christian colleagues had no intention of honouring this caveat. The interests of the Empire must be served no matter what. As he said, in private of course, to Lord Curzon, who succeeded him:
“Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, and is of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
What prejudices was his Lordship referring to, I wonder? Didn’t we, in Palestine, Moslems, Christians and Jews, live together in peace and harmony for centuries? Instead, Lord Balfour conveniently forgot his own prejudices and those of his peers and countrymen, when in 1905, as Prime Minister of........