In Palestine and the Arab Conflict: a history with documents (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), Charles D. Smith (2013) gives the audience insights into the underlying conflicts, the factors of culture and religion, the impact of foreign policy and hegemony, and in this direction, the ushering of the contemporary era that helped in molding the issues as well as the dynamics of the region in the present day. One of the more significant issues in the Middle East is the adoption of the “Balfour Declaration.” The Declaration has long been regarded as a milestone in the relations of the Jews with the Palestinians. Oftentimes, the document has been understood as a “profession of genuine support for the aims of political Zionism.”
In this light, the Jews perceived the British were actively working for the creation of the Jewish homeland. This perception among the Jews regarding the workings of the British on Jewish independence seemed to find support owing to the declarations of British officials in the immediate aftermath of the Great War as well as in the examination of many historiographers.
Miller (2013, pp. 15-16) avers that though there were digressing views on the significance of the agreement to the region, the overriding concept is that the document was the inception of the growing foreign relations between the British and the Zionists and even can be at point regarded as the ‘high point’ of their diplomatic status. Nonetheless, the significance of the agreement has been speculated upon recently.
Davidson (2001, pp. 39-40) avers that the early part of the 1920s saw the generation of a great deal of confusion on the effectivity of the mandates given after the War. The turmoil was based on the belief that the control of the area by the British was legitimate owing to the legal basis given by the League of Nations. Simply put, the Jews held that the international community had charged the British with establishing an authority in Palestine with the goal of creating a Jewish homeland; the second objective was the more critical of these beliefs as the Balfour accord was integrated into the legal document for the Palestine region. Nonetheless, what will be discovered is that the operation of the Declaration, based on the authority given by the League, is at best ambiguous, too vague at best to anchor any argument for the establishment of the Jewish homeland.
Nevertheless, the perception of Zionism, and supporting the Jews, was a difficult enterprise to achieve given the high anti-Semitic sentiment in major powers at the time, particularly the United States. Then United States President Franklin Roosevelt was ill-informed of the actual situation in Palestine. Worse, Roosevelt anchored American policy in the region on a flawed interpretation of the Balfour Declaration as well as the actual benefits owed to the Jews. In a correspondence to Cordell Hull regarding a White Paper given by the British, Roosevelt posited a flawed comprehension that the British fully intended to transform Palestine into the Jewish states over the protests of the Arabs in the region.
It must be noted that in the White Paper, the position of the Arabs was favored over that of the Jews. Christison (2001, pp. 47-48) avers that at the time, Roosevelt was correct in his assumption that supported the international perceptions that the Declaration was definitive in its objective of handing over Palestine to Israel; however, the British government did not push for such a categorical action. In an earlier command paper, the British declared that the government had not considered any policy direction geared towards realizing the designation of Palestine as the Jewish homeland. By the time that Roosevelt assumed the presidency of the United States, the predominant “official” position regarding Palestine was that of the Zionists.
Regrettably, Roosevelt was oblivious to the real occurrences and the attitudes of the Arabs in Palestine at the time. The Hull memorandum regarding the 1939 British command paper evinced a provision that would restrict Jewish immigration to 75,000 spread over a half decade period. Roosevelt jettisoned Arab protestations regarding the waves of Jewish immigrants to the Holy Land. To Roosevelt, the amount of Arab immigrants had over exceeded the number of Jewish immigrants since 1920.
Here, Roosevelt had no comprehension for the sentiments of the Arabs regarding their native homeland and did not fully comprehend the effect of Zionism on the native Arabs. Simply put, sans adopting a policy of exiling an entire population, Roosevelt brushed aside the sentiment of the Arabs in developing policy for American relations with Zionists in the region. For example, Roosevelt was contemplating on possibilities to ‘move’ a significant number of Arabs in Palestine to Iraq or to some other region in the Middle East so that “90 percent of Palestine would be Jewish (Christison, 2001, pp. 47-48).
The response of the Zionists to the “San Remo” Agreements, where Britain and France carved Palestine as well as the other Ottoman provinces in the Middle East, was extremely upbeat. The American press carried banner stories where marches evincing their support of the British award of Palestine to themselves drew large crowds. In essence, the British took it upon themselves to restore Palestine on the purported “grant” of legitimacy of the international community that the British avers was “placed on their shoulders.” In this light, the Declaration can be regarded as nothing more as ‘sanitizing’ the spoils system from the War and framing it as a crusade to restore the area answering the call of the international community to help the area recover from the effects of the War.
However, the Declaration held little value for the Zionists compared to that of the Mandate. Withal, it also cannot be stated that the Declaration did not surpass the value of the Mandate. Rather, it can be stated that the Declaration built upon the foundations established by the Mandate. This is a critical differentiation on the issue. Miller (2013, p. 16) avers that the objectives and policies set in the Declaration-that of the establishment of the “Jewish homeland” as well as the safeguarding of the rights and civil liberties of the non-Jewish sector in the area-was at the core of the Palestine Mandate.
The dilemma, however, lay in the lack of the definition as to what actually comprised that “homeland.” In a similar vein, the liberties and guarantees that were given to the non-Jewish communities, the possible impact of the Declaration on these communities vis-à-vis the establishment of the “homeland,” and the operation of the safeguards to protect the non-Jews in the area, were not extensively discussed. Sans these delineations, there were no clear cut guidelines as to the manner the country will be governed or as to its primary purpose. That vagueness was a basic flaw in the language of the Mandate that was in turn inherited from the Declaration.
What is the main problem here is that the legal bases for the establishment of the homeland of both Arabs and Jews was not a legal instrument in the first place. The Balfour document was not designed to be a guide for governance or even a draft of the possible governmental options in the region. In essence, the Declaration was no more than a publicity release, with little or no intention to positively impact the prevailing or the future conduct of the Palestine region (p. 16).
References
Christison, K (2001) Perceptions of Palestine: Their influence in U.S. Middle East policy. Berkeley: University of California Press
Davidson, L (2001) America’s Palestine: popular and official perceptions from Balfour to Israeli statehood. Gainesville: University Press of Florida
Miller, R (2013) Britain, Palestine, and Empire: the Mandate years. Burlington, Ashgate Publishing
Smith, C. D (2013) Palestine and the Arab Israeli Conflict: a history with documents. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
