An Article From The Irish Political Review, July 2002
The
Jewish State:—A Historical Perspective
The leader
of the Jewish State declared a couple of months ago that he would hit the Arabs
of the conquered West Bank until they begged for mercy. But this democratic
policy—this policy of the State which we are told is the only democracy
in the Middle East—has not worked yet, and it shows no signs of working.
The Arabs have certainly been hit hard, with the practical consent of the United
Nations and the European Union, and with active encouragement from the United
States. But, instead of begging for mercy, they have been hitting back stronger
than ever before. There was a brief pause while the Jewish State was actually
wreaking havoc on a massive scale in Jenin and other towns. But, once the frenzy
had spent itself—and it was not the kind of thing that could be kept up
indefinitely, unless it was regularised into a bureaucratic structure of extermination
or mass expulsion—Arab retaliation picked up again. And it is now maintaining
a consistently high rate of attrition. The Jews still do more killing, of course,
but one Jew for every three Arabs is not, in the strategic situation, a favourable
rate of attrition for the Jewish State and its colonies in the conquered territories.
The
leaders of the Palestinian Intifada made an offer to the Jewish State a few
months ago: they would call off the suicide bombing within Israel, if the Jewish
colonisation of the conquered territories were halted, and would only attack
the settlements outside Israel. The offer was spurned. The democratic Government
of Israel refused to make this practical political distinction between citizens
of the State of Israel and Jews who go out from the State of Israel to colonise
the conquered territories.
This
refusal shows what a red herring the Israeli claim is that it cannot make peace
with the Palestinians because they refuse to recognise the State of Israel.
Israel itself refuses to recognise the State of Israel when it refuses to make
an effective distinction between Israelis and colonising Jews outside Israel.
Israel
is a partial realisation of the project of making Palestine a Jewish State which
was launched about a hundred years ago by the Zionist Organisation. The political
dynamic of Zionism, which led to the formation of the State of Israel as a first
instalment of the Jewish State, has dominated Israeli politics and has seized
every opportunity to extend the Jewish State beyond the boundaries of Israel.
In
recent months there have been mutterings in Whitehall about “failed
States”, directed towards Africa. Those entities in southern Africa
now designated as failed states are, one and all, British Imperial constructions.
But the prime candidate for “failed State”
status is the last British Imperial project: the Jewish State in Palestine.
None of the African states, however badly conducted in its internal affairs,
has had the catastrophic influence on world affairs that the attempt to make
Palestine a Jewish State has had. And nowhere else in the world today is ghettoisation
being undertaken but in the sphere of the Jewish State—as an official policy
directed against Arabs.
**********
The
construction of a Jewish state in Palestine (including the organising of a massive
influx of Jews into Palestine, displacing the native population, as its foundation)
had its idealistic source in a book by Theodore Herzl, Der
Judenstaat, published a little over a hundred years ago. It practical
political source was the Balfour Declaration, adopted by the British Government
in November 1917 and written into the programme of the League of Nations by
Britain a couple of years later.
The
League of Nations, an extravagantly moral organisation dedicated to democracy
and the rights of nations, decided in substance, under British dictation, that
there should be massive ethnic cleansing of the existing population of Palestine
to make way for massive Jewish colonisation. It neglected to make out the moral
case which obliged the Palestinians to submit quietly to this decision. The
only moral case that could have been made was that superior peoples had superior
rights and that the British and the Jews were superior peoples. And, while that
was undoubtedly the unspoken case, it was not a case that could be stated openly
within the formal ideology of the League of Nations. The League therefore adopted
the fantasy position that the policy of swamping Palestine with Jews did not
conflict in any way with the rights of the existing population of Palestine,
but was in fact beneficial to it.
One
would have hesitated to use the word “swamping”
until very recently, even though it was the appropriate word for describing
what Britain and the League of Nations set in motion in Palestine the 1920s.
But, since Benjamin Netanyahu has categorically ruled out the return of Palestinian
refugees to the places from which they were driven out by Jewish terror on the
ground that this would “swamp Israel with
Arabs", and since Conor Cruise O’Brien declared his support
for Netanyahu after he had made that statement, and since O’Brien remains
the darling of the good people of Dublin 4, we take it that “swamping”
is now a ‘moderate’
word and we use it to describe the organised Jewish influx into Palestine in
the 1920s and subsequently. But that is the only connection in which we would
use it. Its use by the present British Home Secretary—the former President
of the South Yorkshire Socialist Republic—to describe the trickle of Third
World immigrants into affluent Britain is completely unwarranted. Nothing comparable
to the pouring of Jews into Palestine by the British Empire occurred anywhere
else in the world.
The
Greek invasion of Turkey in 1919, instigated by Britain, resulted in large-scale
population transfers when the Turks defeated the Greeks. But that was an incident
in a war. Then in 1945 the Czech Government, which in 1938 had given in to Hitler
without firing a shot, greatly increasing his armaments, took revenge for its
earlier cowardice by launching a comprehensive ethnic cleansing of Germans.
In 1945 too the Polish state was shifted westwards and the Germans were cleared
out to make way for Poles. Even though these events are now, with the expansion
of the European Union, ceasing to be ‘history’
and are becoming current politics, and even though Czechs and Poles settled
in the areas from which the Germans had been cleared out, they were in their
time incidents which happened within the ambience of a Great War, and which
would not have occurred but for that war.
Britain’s
Palestine policy was not an incident in a War. And it was not the punishment
of an enemy. The Arabs had been Britain’s ally in the War. It was a policy
of colonisation against an ally, cold-bloodedly undertaken in peacetime for
the purpose of enhancing the power of the Imperial state.
The
Balfour Declaration was issue in wartime, but it was implemented in peacetime.
Its wording was calculatingly ambiguous, leaving the British Empire free to
interpret it as it pleased after the war. The Jewish nationalists represented
it in 1917 as an undertaking to form Palestine (where Jews were less than 10%
of the population) into a Jewish State. The British Empire was under no contractual
obligation after the War, on the strength of the Declaration, to set about forming
non-Jewish Palestine into a Jewish State. But it chose to do so.
Conor
Cruise O’Brien, a staunch supporter of Jewish nationalist irredentism,
argues in substance that Britain in 1917 needed the active support of international
Jewry in order to win the war which it had declared on Germany three years earlier
and therefore it issued the Balfour Declaration. It does not seem to me that
the difference between this view and the view that an international Jewish conspiracy
exercises a powerful influence on world affairs is easy to grasp. At least I
cannot grasp it. All I can see is two ways of saying the same thing, one approving,
the other disapproving.
If
the British Empire felt itself to be dependent on the influence of international
Jewry to win its war on Germany, I suppose it follows that the continuing influence
of international Jewry after the War caused it to read the deliberate ambiguities
of the Balfour Declaration as a contractual undertaking to establish Palestine
into a Jewish State?
At
any rate, while Ireland, which voted in 1918 to be a separate state, was excluded
from the Versailles Conference and had its national claim denied by the League
of Nations, there was a strong Jewish presence at Versailles and the Jewish
national claim to Palestine, despite an absence of two thousand years, was taken
to be valid by the League.
The
first book in support of the Balfour Declaration published in England by an
English political writer was both a history of the Jews and a review of the
requirements of the British Empire as an expansionist force in world affairs.
It considered the prospects for a new Jewish State in the light of the experience
of the Jewish State which had been overthrown some time previously, and which
was the basis of the Zionist national claim on Palestine.
The
book was England
And Palestine: Essays Towards The Restoration Of The Jewish State. It
was published by Constable in 1918. The author was Herbert Sidebotham, an eminent
journalist on the Manchester
Guardian, a member of the British Palestine Society in Manchester, whose
purpose was to establish a “community of
ideals and interests between Zionism and British policy”, and a
Secretary to Lloyd George as Prime Minister.
The
Jewish nationalist claim on Palestine, which leaps across two thousand years,
implies, if there is any sense at all to it, that the Jews have remained the
same people throughout that period. Sidebotham took up the matter in those terms.
And he drew from the experience of the previous Jewish State the conclusion
that a future Jewish State in Palestine would only be tolerable if it existed
under the hegemony of the British Empire.
(The
Romans banned the Jews from Jerusalem—not from Palestine—on the grounds
that they went crazy when they lived there. Sidebotham does not put it quite
like that, but he is thereabouts.)
Here
is Sidebotham’s account of the previous Jewish State:
“In 141 [BC] the Greek garrison in the citadel of Jerusalem were starved out and the land was rid of foreign troops.
“Two years later Judea was completely independent and had a coinage of its own. Thirty three years later John Hyrcanus brought Samaria under Maccabean authority, and under Aristobulus Galilee was conquered and forcibly proselytized to Judaism.
“The conquests of the Maccabees were not for the good of Palestine. Not only was the Greek civilization that had done so much for the economic development of the country destroyed, but every race or civilization that was not Jewish was treated with merciless cruelty or oppression. The ideas of the Maccabean rulers, surrounded with a halo when they are fighting against an alien domination, become detestable when they are imposing their own domination on others. They were indeed justified in striving for the whole of the national inheritance, which was not limited to Judaea. But the one chance of permanence for the Jewish state of Palestine was that it should make allies of the surrounding peoples and show by a wise tolerance that it was capable of governing others. This chance they missed, and the glory of the Maccabees, if it is an inspiration, is also a warning to any future state in Palestine” (p48).
With
the expansion of the Roman Empire into the Middle East, the Jewish State was
reduced territorially to Judea and the surrounding area and placed under Roman
hegemony. Under Julius Caesar, Augustus and Tiberius the Jews held a privileged
position in the Empire, not only in Palestine, but also in Rome. But privilege
led to rebellion: “Julius Caesar had thought
of using the Jews as an instrument for the establishment of Roman rule over
the East, for he knew well that if he leaned on the Greeks the staff would pierce
his hand, and what he wanted was an Oriental people who would serve his purposes.
If Caesar hoped to overthrow Parthia by their means it was not altogether unnatural
that the Jews should feel themselves equal, if not to overthrowing Rome, at
any rate to establishing their independence." (p62).
Although
it was launched at a moment when Rome was divided by civil war, the Jewish rebellion
was suppressed. The infrastructure of the Jewish State was abolished. The Temple
in Jerusalem was destroyed and Jews were forbidden to come within ten miles
of Jerusalem. But the Jews as members of a religious tendency were not persecuted,
and one of the leaders of the revolt, Josephus, became an eminent man of letters
in Rome.
“The
real religious faith of Rome was the Roman Empire itself and its mission to
direct the political destinies of the civilized world”:
that was Sidebotham’s view. And, in describing Rome thus, he took it that
he was also describing Britain, which had been modelling itself closely on the
Roman Empire for about half a century before the Balfour Declaration. Rome/Britain
was tolerant of mere differences of religious belief and conscience, and could
deal handsomely with rebels once their rebellion had been crushed, because it
was the supreme power in this world and had the affairs of this world well in
hand.
And Sidebotham saw Britain realising, by means of the Balfour Declaration, Caesar’s
project of incorporating the Jews into the Empire as an active expansionary
force in the Middle East.
“If they had responded to Caesar’s overtures, the Jews might have ousted the Greeks as the leading race in the East. The Roman Empire would have been permanently extended to the Tigris and the Persian Gulf, and the chief part of the commercial development would have been played by the Jews. They might easily have anticipated by several hundred years the glories of Bagdad under the Arab Caliphs. But at no time under the Romans did a leader of the Jews arise who showed any political capacity. They never realized that a price has to be paid for everything, and that, as things were the best chance of their future and also of the preservation of their free religious life lay in a political alliance with Rome” (p71).
But
the Jews rebelled against Rome. In the course of that rebellion there was extensive
mutual slaughter of Jews and Greeks in Judea, Cyprus and Egypt. When Rome restored
order, it “changed the official name of
Judea to Syria Palaestina, and the Jews were forbidden under pain of death from
setting foot in Jerusalem or even gazing on its ruins” (p71).
Palestine
then developed as a culturally Greek province of the Roman Empire. And Judaism
responded to the loss of Jerusalem by narrowing its outlook and formulating
it into a tightly organised system of rituals or laws. At least that is how
it is described by a German/Jewish writer of the 1920s-30s, Lion Feuchtwanger,
who represents the retreat of Judaism into introverted exclusivism as a development
which favoured the growth of Christianity‚which was, of course, a Jewish
religion to start with.
(D.A.
Akenson, who has published absurd books of hagiography about Conor Cruise O’Brien
and an absurd book of disparagement abut the Irish in Martinique, has also published
a book on the Bible in which he sets out the interesting idea that Christianity
is an older religion than Judaism, because what we know as Judaism was formed
as a Jewish adaptation to the loss of Jerusalem in the Jewish War (of 66 AD).
Certain developments in Islam in recent times might be seen, in like manner,
as resulting from the defilement of sacred places in Jerusalem by the Israelis,
and in Mecca by the American occupation of Saudi Arabia.
Rules-based
and inward-looking Jewish religious forms also fostered a very tight coherence
amongst the Jewish Diaspora—any Jewish person can feel immediately at home
in another Jewish community, and the rule that Jews had to live within walking
distance of their synagogue was a further aid to maintaining their separate
identity as a group in whatever country they might reside in.)
Sidebotham’s
review of the British Empire must be skipped over for reasons of space. This
is his conclusion about the Middle East:
“Nothing is more certain than that if Palestine became part of the British Empire it would never be colonized in any real sense by the sort of Englishmen who have made Canada and Australia. The only possible colonists of Palestine are the Jews. Only they can build up in the Mediterranean a new dominion associated with this country from the outset in Imperial work, at once a protection against the alien East and a mediator between it and us, a civilization distinct from ours yet imbued with our political ideas, at the same stage of political development, and beginning its second life as a nation with a debt of gratitude to this country as its second father” (p186).
He
envisages no serious conflict with the Arabs in the implementation of this project:
“Some sort of compromise would have to be effected east of the Jordan, and provided that the relations between the Jews and Arabs are as friendly as they have usually been in the past, this compromise would not be far to seek… There is between Judaism and Mohammedanism no such antagonism as there has been between Mohammedanism and Christianity, and the project of reviving the Arab Power side by side with the Jewish State is the strongest of arguments for compromise and adjustment of their claims where they seem to conflict” (p198).
That
was a realistic calculation—provided that Britain honoured its agreement
with the Sharif of Mecca which brought about the Arab Revolt against Turkey
in 1916, i.e., that Britain would recognise an Arab State at the end of the
War. Early in 1919 Faisal, the man who would be King under the Agreement, made
an agreement with the Zionist leader, Weizmann, accepting the Balfour Declaration.
But he added a postscript that his acceptance of the Balfour Declaration was
entirely conditional on Britain honouring its commitment to accept the Arab
State. However, what Britain did was divide the Middle East with France, and
it Balkanised its own share into a series of puppet-states. That was by far
the greatest act of treachery in world affairs in the 20th century—and
no comparable act of treachery in earlier centuries springs to mind—and
its consequences are still working themselves out.
**********
“A Jewish State that is a dominion of the British Empire… would be saved from the dangers that ruined it in the past. Of these its powerful foreign enemies were not perhaps the most fatal to its welfare. It is a hard thing to say, but had the Jewish State under the Romans been faithful to the policy of Herod there is no reason whatever why it should have been destroyed by Rome. The chief cause of the quarrel between Rome and Palestine was the rivalry between the interests of the Church and the interests of the State. The Jewish nation in Palestine began as a theocracy, continued as a kingdom, and after the return from the captivity became once more a theocracy, through a theocracy more bigoted than the old, surrounded by still more powerful enemies, and in consequence narrower and more intolerant… The treatment of its Arab neighbours by the revived Jewish State was possessed by a cruelty only possible to religious bigots. The same spirit of fanaticism… ruined the chances of a second restoration under the Roman Empire. In this respect there is not the smallest chance of history repeating itself…” (p240).
That last remark presumably reflects Sidebotham’s acquaintance with the character of the Manchester Jews, of which Weizmann was one and Marks of Marks and Spencer was another. But the feeling one is left with about Weizmann is that he always knew what facade to present to a Gentile, but that his existence lay well behind the facades.
(Sidebotham saw Judaism as having become “Erastian”—a
position which establishes the State independently of the Church and in supremacy
over the Church. But why should “Erastian”
Jews be concerned to establish a state which was Jewish? This self-contradiction,
which Sidebotham overlooked, was taken account of by a number of genuinely ‘Erastian’
Jews, who held eminent positions in British public life. One of these,
Montefiori, published a number of pamphlets against the Balfour Declaration,
arguing that the establishment of a Jewish State would involve a resurgence
of Jewish fundamentalism.)
In
any case, what Sidebotham judged to be impossible is pretty well what has come
about—a second Maccabean State. And it came about because Britain, having
betrayed and outraged the Arabs in 1919-20, lost its purposeful sense of Imperial
destiny in the course of the 1920s as the cost to the Middle Class of its Great
War sank in, and let its Middle East project drift, and the Zionist movement
came to be powered from Eastern Europe by Jews who would have made Herbert Sidebotham
very uneasy indeed in 1918.
Brendan
Clifford
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