Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (28 page)

After his retirement from office Woodrow Wilson lived quietly in Washington D.C., refraining from political comments and avoiding political contacts, though he did, as we have seen, authorise the release of the suppressed King-Crane Commission report. I imagine he did so in the hope that it might play a part in causing his successors to do what was necessary to prevent Zionism getting completely out of control, in Congress as well as Palestine.

The received wisdom about Woodrow Wilson’s contribution to history is that reflected in
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. According to it the intensity of his idealistic fervour crippled his ability for effective compromise. “He was impatient of partisan opposition and there was much of the intolerant Calvinist in his refusal to temporise or deviate from the path which he believed himself appointed by providence to tread. His illusion that the nobility of ideals would suffice to obliterate the stubborn facts of political life took his international policy down the road to bankruptcy.” He was a great leader “but lacked the political intuition and deftness… which might have strengthened his contribution to the peace conference and brought the United States into the League of Nations.”

That is one verdict. Mine is different and in two parts and perhaps— how shall I put it?—more in accordance with what is known today about what actually happened.

The first is that President Wilson got screwed by Imperial Britain-and-Zionism and their allies in Congress and the media; with assistance as required from France. I also think he might not have been screwed, at least on the matter of Palestine, if he had not had a stroke.

The second is that he was too good a man for the politics of his era (and perhaps of any era). I think, as I said in the Prologue, that he was many, many years ahead of his time. I mean that, given the state of the world today, there is coming a time when the idealism he represented will be seen as pragmatism and the only alternative to a new dark age of totalitarianism. He was, in my judgement, rather like Asher Zevi Ginsberg, Ahad Ha-am in print—a prophet without sufficient honour in his own time.

With President Wilson’s exit from the stage, America was once more in an isolationist mood. And that left Zionism free to fill the foreign policy-making vacuum in America. And Britain free to make a mess in Palestine.

The justification for continuing the occupation of Palestine after conquest in World War I was that Britain was there by right of possession of a Mandate endorsed by the League of Nations. The Mandate gave the British enterprise the appearance of legality but it was not one that stood the test of examination, as debates in the House of Lords indicated and Cattan’s judiciously argued book demonstrated. If the League of Nations had been much more than the tool of British and French imperialism, Britain would not have gotten the endorsement of a Mandate that was fatally flawed because it was legally invalid as well as being an instrument of injustice.

The Mandate system was an experiment. In essence the major powers who lost the war renounced their overseas possessions in favour of the victorious powers as approved by the League of Nations; but there was a general understanding that Mandates for the territories renounced were to be granted to the victorious powers not for the purposes of political aggrandisement or commercial exploitation—i.e. not for perpetuating colonialism, but in the spirit of
trusteeship.
The basic idea in principle was that the “backward peoples” of the renounced territories were not swapping one colonial master for another, but one colonial master for an enlightened and sympathetic Big Brother (officially the “Mandatory”) who would guide and assist them to independence. In practice Britain looked upon its possession of the Mandate for Palestine as the means of extending and perpetuating its empire with Zionist assistance. In everything but name Palestine became a British colony when Britain’s Mandate for the territory was endorsed by the Council of the League of Nations on 24 July 1922.

Palestine and International Law
is widely regarded as a seminal work on its subject. In it Henry Cattan, a jurist of international repute, set down the several grounds on which Britain’s Mandate for Palestine was invalid.

The first was that by incorporating the Balfour Declaration and therefore accepting the concept of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, “the Mandate violated the sovereignty of the people of Palestine and their natural rights of independence and self-determination. Palestine was the national home of the Palestinians from time immemorial. The establishment of a national home there for an alien people was a violation of the legitimate and fundamental rights of the inhabitants. The League of Nations did not possess the power, any more than the British government did, to dispose of Palestine, or to grant to the Jews any political or territorial rights in that country. In so far as the Mandate purported to recognise any rights for alien Jews in Palestine, it was null and void.”
¹

In Britain the House of Lords opposed the incorporation of the Balfour Declaration in the Mandate. On 21 June 1922 there was a debate in that House on a motion declaring the Mandate to be unacceptable in its present form—i.e. because it did incorporate the Balfour Declaration.

Speaking for the motion, Lord Islington said that in its existing form the Mandate directly violated the pledges made by His Majesty’s Government to the people of Palestine. In the course of his prophetic speech he said the following:

In fact, very many orthodox Jews, not only in Palestine but all over the world, view with the deepest misapprehension, not to say dislike, this principle of a Zionist home in Palestine... The scheme of Zionist Home seeks to make Zionist political predominance effective in Palestine by importing into the country extraneous and alien Jews from other parts of the world... This scheme of importing an alien race into the midst of a native local race is flying in the face of the whole of the tendencies of the age. It is an unnatural experiment… It is literally inviting subsequent catastrophe... The harm done by dumping down an alien population upon an Arab country— Arab all round in the hinterland—may never be remedied... What we have done, by concessions, not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is start a running sore in the East, and no one can tell how far that sore will extend.
²

By this time Balfour had been elevated to the House of Lords and he replied to Lord Islington’s criticism. It was possible, Lord Balfour conceded, that “Zionism may fail.” But this was an adventure. “Are we never to have adventures? Are we never to try new experiments?” Then, with a mixture of calculated indifference and arrogance, Lord Balfour said: “I do not think I need dwell upon this imaginary wrong which the Jewish Home is going to inflict upon the local Arabs.”
³

Lord Islington had pointed out that the Mandate’s provisions concerning the establishment of a Jewish national home were inconsistent with Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.

Cattan was to make the same point in his own way and with greater precision. “The second ground of invalidity of the Mandate is that it violated, in spirit and in letter, Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, under the authority of which it purported to be made.”
⁴

Article 22 was of supreme importance because it was the one that defined the basic objective of the Mandate system. It was to assure “the well-being and development” of the peoples inhabiting the Mandated territories; an objective described by Article 22 as forming “a sacred trust of civilisation.”

Question: Was Britain’s Mandate for Palestine conceived (by the British) for the well-being and development of the inhabitants of Palestine?

As Cattan said, the answer was in the provisions of the Mandate itself.

The Mandate sought the establishment in Palestine of a national home for another people, contrary to the rights and wishes of the Palestinians. It required the Mandatory (Britain) to place the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as would secure the establishment of a Jewish national home. It required the Mandatory to facilitate Jewish immigration into Palestine. It provided that a foreign body known as the Zionist Organisation should be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the (British) Administration of Palestine in matters affecting the establishment of the Jewish national home. It is clear that although the Mandate system was conceived in the interest of the inhabitants of the Mandated territory, the Palestine Mandate was conceived in the interest of an alien people originating from outside Palestine, and ran counter to the basic concept of mandates.
⁵

In short, Britain’s Mandate for Palestine was “nothing but a travesty of the Mandate system as conceived by the Covenant of the League of Nations.”
⁶
Lord Islington described the Palestine Mandate as “a real distortion of the Mandatory system.” He added: “When one sees its Article 22… that the well-being and development of such peoples should form a sacred trust of civilisation, and when one takes that as the keynote of the Mandatory system, I think your Lordships will see that we are straying down a very far path when we are postponing self-government in Palestine until such time as the population is flooded with an alien race.”
⁷

When the motion declaring the Mandate in its present form to be unacceptable was put to a vote in the House of Lords, it was carried by 60 to 29.

In the House of Commons two weeks later the government succeeded in defeating a motion calling on it to submit the Mandate for approval by parliament.

And that was the basis on which the British government formally sought and obtained the approval of the Council of the League of Nations for the Mandate.

As it happened neither the Balfour Declaration nor the Mandate for Palestine were approved by the British parliament. A policy with catastrophe written all over it was never endorsed by the British people. In fact they, the people, had no knowledge worth having of what was happening and being done in their name. Open diplomacy of the kind President Wilson called for was intended to make governments accountable to their people before points of no return were passed. (One might say that the prospect of open diplomacy was destroyed by his stroke).

During the 26 years of its Mandate, Britain’s main achievement was to set in motion three conflicts:

 


1. • One between the indigenous and betrayed Arabs of Palestine and the incoming (extraneous and alien) Zionist Jews;
   

 


2. • One between Palestinian nationalists and the forces of the occupying British; and
   

 


3. • One, eventually, between the Zionist Jews in Palestine and the British.
   

To reduce the prospect of a violent Arab challenge to its occupation of Palestine and its predominant influence in the region as a whole, Imperial Britain had need to mend its fences with the Hashemites, whose leader, Hussein of the Hedjaz, it had betrayed. The fence mending was to be in the form of reward for Hussein’s two sons, Faysal and Abdullah. Faysal was to be imposed upon the people of Iraq as their king with the prime role of protecting Britain’s oil interests in that country. Abdullah was to be given a part of Palestine to be called Transjordan and of which Abdullah would become king.

Under Turkish rule Palestine east of the River Jordan was part and parcel of the province of Syria and was known as the district of Al Balqa. It was this territory the British were to give to Abdullah in the expectation that he would become their man and would assist them to prevent Palestinian nationalism becoming an uncontrollable force. Weizmann had hoped the British would give Transjordan to Zionism but he was to be disappointed. Britain needed friends to help it suppress the fire of Palestinian nationalism, not friends who would fan the flames.

A brief account of the repositioning of the Hashemites will enable readers to make some sense of Britain’s Palestine policy as it unfolds in the pages to come.

After the defeat and expulsion of the Turks, Hussein became the absolute and undisputed ruler of his part of the vast territory that was to become (in 1927) the independent kingdom, Saudi Arabia. His hope was that he and his sons would end up controlling and ruling all of it. And perhaps more. Given that the Hashemites were descended from the Prophet and were the Guardians of Islam’s Holy Places, it was not an unreasonable expectation on his part. But Hussein had a rival. Ibn Saud. For a while the British played their time-honoured game of supporting, funding and arming both sides in the struggle for power in the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, ready to dump the loser at the right time.

It was, in fact, action by France that triggered the repositioning of the Hashemites on the big power chessboard of the Arab world east of Suez.

In July 1920—two months after the San Remo announcement that France was to have the Mandates for Syria and Lebanon, and Britain the Mandate for Palestine—the French drove Faysal, Hussein’s first son, out of Syria; thus bringing to an end the arrangement for independence the Arabs had proclaimed for themselves in accordance with the promises Britain had made to Hussein. (So the need for Britain to reposition Faysal in Iraq was great).