Time
to rethink the
Balfour Declaration
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
August 19, 2006
LONDON - Perhaps it is time if not
to re-write the Balfour declaration, at least to
re-direct it, back to Europe from whence most Jewish
settlers in Israel have come.
The animosity that is making the
clash of civilizations a current reality (though
historically, pace Samule Huntington, it never was a
permanent phenomenon) is driven first and foremost by the
unsettled issue of the division of Palestine. If this
could be solved Al Qaeda's influence would sharply
diminish. So would Hamas' and Hizbollah's. But left to
stew as it is now, it is spilling over into Lebanon and
perhaps in a few years into a nuclear confrontation
between Israel and Iran, or even, if President Pervez
Musharaff is assassinated and a more Islamic minded
president comes to power, between Israel and
Pakistan.
As relations between Jew and Muslim
deteriorate not only Israel is becoming unliveable for
ordinary people (read Israeli novelist Shifra Horn's new
book, "Ode to Joy", if you want to smell the cordite and
sense deep in the soul the everyday fear of being blown
up) but so are parts of Europe and North America
gradually becoming so. Just as Israel has terrorists in
its midst so now do the UK, Spain, France, Russia, the
U.S. and Canada.
Today it is the fear of another
World Trade Center, another Spanish railway station,
apartment blocks in Moscow, a tube bombing in London, not
to mention the current plot to down airliners leaving
Heathrow and the total chaos to hundreds of thousands of
peoples' lives this has caused. Do we really want to end
up living like the besieged Israelis with an angry Islam
world not only without but within our own societies? For
surely it is going to get worse, now that George W. Bush
and Tony Blair have ratcheted up the degree of
confrontation with their counterproductive policies in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, the Lebanon, and the central
problem itself, Israel/Palestine.
The Jews should never have gone en
masse to Israel. The decision of the British foreign
minister Arthur Balfour and his prime minister David
Lloyd George to support in the British colony of
Palestine, in the wake of the fall of the Ottoman Empire,
the aspiration for a Jewish "national home" was arguably
the single greatest mistake ever made by the leaders of
the British Empire.
Lloyd George was a religious man
who saw the Zionist cause as one that must be supported
by Christian charity. But what sense did it make? If
every group of ethnic kin with an ancient pedigree did
this where would we be? The Indians could reclaim North
and South America, the Moguls Russia and the Hottentots
South Africa.
The Jews left what we now call
Palestine two millennia ago. In AD 70 after the Jewish
insurrection the Roman occupiers destroyed the Jerusalem
Temple and the majority of Jews fled to Babylon, modern
day Iraq. Other Jews went to Egypt, the Romans enslaved
many and others were dispersed by war and catastrophe to
Italy, Spain, Gaul and Eastern Europe. Judaism, although
it is still by far the smallest of the monotheistic
religions, spread by proselytism. By the late Middle Ages
the heartland of Jewish settlement was the
Polish-Lithuanian state and remained so until the advent
of Hitler and Stalin.
We all know the German and Soviet
story, that allowed rampant anti-Semitism to create the
concentration camp and the gulag. We all know that
without this modern Israel would never have taken off and
the Zionist cause would probably have withered quietly in
the desert. But today Germany is probably the most
welcoming of all European nations to Jewish immigrants
and in Russia anti-Semitism is no longer accepted by
government. At the University of Moscow, Russia's elite
academic institution, the Jewish presence is very
marked.
So the European Union and Russia
should make an immense effort to attract the Jews back
from Israel. For the EU this would mean fast tracking an
Israeli membership of the EU. Younger Jews, fearful of
the future for their young families, would welcome an
easy opportunity to leave Israel. Older Jews could be
enticed by the restitution of their families' property.
All in all it should work to make
the Israelis who remain feel less besieged and thus be
less tenacious and unyielding. Indeed the quid pro quo
for EU membership and the economic benefits and security
that offers must be that Israel accept King Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia's peace plan of 2002 which, building on the
negotiations conducted at Camp David by President Bill
Clinton, foresees a division based on the 1967
borders.
Without such "out of the box"
thinking we are all going to be sucked under by the
maelstrom being unleashed by what is dangerously becoming
a true "clash of civilizations".
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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