The Balfour Judgment
Op-ed: While the Palestinian Authority calls to prosecute the UK for the Balfour Declaration, let's re-examine the document itself that calls to establish a home for the Jewish people, before a false narrative tried to devalue it.
In Jerusalem, the few words, "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people"—the heart of the Balfour Declaration—do not evoke excitement. Ramallah, on the other hand, sees them as the root of its national tragedy, "the Nakba," and has raised the ridiculous idea toprosecute the UK for the letter that its foreign secretary wrote to the head of the Zionist movement in Britain, Lord Rothschild, nearly a century ago.
Ramallah has as its key witness another member of the British cabinet at the time, Edwin Montagu, who led the opposition to the declaration. His being a Jewish man does not pose a problem in Ramallah, which is used to anti-Israeli Jews. Montagu saw Zionism as "a mischievous political creed" and considered the Balfour Declaration to be anti-Semitic, writing, "I assert that there is not a Jewish nation… I deny that Palestine is to-day associated with the Jews."
The man is also rather precise about the future: "I assume that…Jews should…be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French." He sarcastically proposed, "Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test." (A precursor to the "Who is a Jew?" debate.)
The prime minister, David Lloyd George, and Balfour, aware of the greatness of their undertaking, stated that the return of Jews to Zion was an historic event approved by divine order. The French ambassador to Britain, Paul Cambon, saw the declaration as a just remedy of past horrors suffered, and Woodrow Wilson, the US president, gave his approval.
Ramallah, therefore, will have to enlarge the number of defendants. The Balfour Declaration supports the "establishment" of a national home, not that it should be "reconstituted," as the original draft read, as Montagu insisted on removing any historical connection between the Jews of his day to the Land of Israel.
Here too, comes salvation, this time from the entire League of Nations, which included the sentence in the mandate that delivered the Land of Israel to the British, quoted word-for-word from the Balfour Declaration.
Here is the reasoning for the positive discrimination that the Jewish people received with the Balfour Declaration, especially in these words: "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." The declaration recognizes only one "people" in the Land of Israel: the Jewish people. Arabs of the country are called "communities," and accordingly, their individual rights are guaranteed—civil and religious only. National rights are given only to the Jewish people—as we would say: "One national home for one people."
Why? Because that time was before the invention of "the Palestinian people," and because that same year the British divided the country and allocated Transjordan to local Arabs, and because the 22 countries that the Arabs have built for themselves are each "one state for one (Arab) people)," just as the Balfour Declaration promised to the Jewish people in its only country.
Well, Montagu and Ramallah. But what is said about Jerusalem, wherein on Balfour Street resides the prime minister of Israel, and he has a vision of a second, Arab, state, inside the one national Jewish home that Balfour envisioned? How get along with this dissonance?
