Editing Palestine (section)

=====Balfour Declaration=====
The other agreement which spurred on Arab nationalism and Islamic resistance during and after the British Mandate was the Balfour Declaration.

The Balfour Declaration was written in 1917 by British foreign secretary Lord Balfour and addressed to the Zionist leader, banker, and politician Lord Rothschild, member of the Rothschild family. It expressed the Lloyd George cabinet's support for a Jewish state in the Mandated territory of Palestine. 
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The text reads:

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

Why did Britain support Zionism? Mouin Rabbani said of Britain's reasoning:<blockquote>"...Zionism, I think, would have emerged and disappeared as yet one more utopian political project had it not been for the British, what the preeminent Palestinian historian, Walid Khalidi, has termed the British Shield, because I think without the British sponsorship, we wouldn’t be having this discussion today [on the Israel-Palestine conflict]."

"The British sponsored Zionism for a very simple reason, which is that during World War I, the Ottoman armies attempted to march on the Suez Canal. Suez Canal was the jugular vein of the British Empire between Europe and India, and the British came to the conclusion that they needed to secure the Suez Canal from any threat. And as the British have done so often in so many places, how do you deal with this? Well, you bring in a foreign minority, implant them amongst a hostile population, and establish a protectorate over them. I don’t think a Jewish state in Palestine had been part of British intentions, and the Balfour Declaration very specifically speaks about a Jewish national home in Palestine, in other words, a British protectorate. Things ended up taking a different course, and I think the most important development was World War II, and I think this had maybe less to do with the Holocaust and more to do with the effective bankruptcy of the United Kingdom during that war, and its inability to sustain its global empire.

"It [The United Kingdom] ended up giving up India, ended up giving up Palestine, and it’s in that context, I think, that we need to see the emergence of a Jewish state in Palestine-- and again, a Jewish state means a state in which the Jewish community enjoys not only a demographic majority, but an uncontestable demographic majority, an uncontestable territorial hegemony, and uncontestable political supremacy. And that is also why after 1948, the nascent Israeli state confiscated, I believe, up to 90% of lands that had been previously owned by Palestinians who became citizens of Israel."</blockquote>The main interest of the British was securing their shipping routes through the Suez Canal during the Empire's decline and the transition to an American-led unipole, completed after World War II. After a meeting with Chaim Weizmann, former Prime Minister Lloyd George said that the European Jews would serve Britain better than Arabs as protectors of the Suez canal. The interests of the Zionists in doing so were formal recognition and material support for their future artificial sovereignty; in other words, full support in their endeavors to build a Jewish nation-state. Thus, Zionism is, at root, not only a ''false'' (Mendelssohnian) theocratic-nationalist movement of European Jewry; but also an ''expansionist'' movement as an extension of the imperialist system. The Nazis called such expansionism Lebensraum, or "living room", when they annexed Czechoslovakia for Germans to settle in. 

This connection is made evident by the olive branch extended by the Lehi to the Nazis during World War II; as well as the Haganah's armed defense of Israeli settlers in the lead up to the 1947 UN Partition Plan and subsequent expulsion of the pre-existing population (called "transfer" by some Zionists and their supporters; called "Nakba" or "catastrophe" by the refugees who were expelled and anti-Zionists). However, the immediate connections between Zionism and Nazism, between the Zionists in Palestine and Nazi Germany, are not only ideological, but economic and political as well.

The Jewish Agency for Palestine's (JA) Anglo-Palestine Bank negotiated with the Zionist Federation of Germany and Nazi Germany, signing an agreement for the migration ("transfer") of German Jews to the British Mandate on August 25th, 1933. About 60,000 Jews emigrated due to the Haavara agreement between 1933 and 1941; it was a win for the Zionists as well as the Nazis. 

Zionist organizations, however, didn't care about German Jews as they claimed: they were the first to normalize trade and relations with Nazi Germany, pocketed most of the money from the agreement, and turned away German Jews who were denied entry to Cuba and the US in May 1939. They distributed Nazi goods across the Middle East and North Africa, disallowed Zionist projects anywhere outside the British Mandate, continued Haavara even after Kristallnacht pogroms and the Nuremberg Race Laws, hosted Adolf Eichmann (SS officer and co-organizer of the Holocaust) in 1937, and lobbied against offers by the UK and Dominican Republic. Zionists denounced all emigration of Jews to anywhere besides the British Mandate, endorsed Nazi bans on mixed-marriages and the creation of Jewish ghettos in Germany. Israeli PM Ben-Gurion even banned anti-Nazi protest when he was in power, and discouraged organized boycotts against Germany.

Thus, with the explicit formal and informal support for a Jewish state from the League of Nations and Britain respectively, we find the British Mandate of Palestine to be a creation of the unipolar imperialist world order, led by Britain-- that is, until another inter-imperialist war broke out in 1938 due to British actions meant to subvert and destroy the Soviet Union, the emerging second pole of a nascent dipolar world. Britain became its own gravedigger, and the United States took the reigns of the Western unipole.
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Albert Einstein said on April 18th, 1938, speaking against the partition of British Palestine in New York, "We are no longer the Jews of the Maccabean period. A return to a nation in the political sense of the word [(viz. as a nation-state)] would be the equivalent of turning away from the spiritualization of our community, which we owe to the genius of our prophets. If external necessity should, after all, compel us to assume this burden, let us bear it in the knowledge that ''it will be in contrast to our nature''." (ital. S.J.)

The Nakba truly began with the import of European Jews between 1882 and 1948, and Mizrahi (Arab) Jews roughly between 1920 and 1950, the "New Yishuv". In addition to import was its opposite-- export of Palestinian Arabs. The Nakba in a strict sense refers to the violence and dispossession of land by Israel in 1948 and 1967, but in a general sense it was the whole systematic expulsion of the native population as well as displacement borne by the children and grandchildren of these refugees. The incomplete "official" number of Palestinian refugees in 1950 was only 750,000, according to the UN. Since neighboring countries took in the displaced population after 1948 and again after the 1967 war, there are ''now'' 6 million Palestinian refugees: 2.4 million in Jordan, almost 600,000 in Syria, another half-million in Lebanon, and an estimated ~80,000 in Egypt. This figure includes the 2.5 million refugees (in 2024) still living in Palestinian occupied territory, most of whom are in the Gaza Strip.
[[File:Maxbisrael2.jpg|thumb|Map of villages depopulated by Zionist forces during the Nakba c. 2013 (Blumenthal)]]