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this will inevitably result in anyone who reads it saying that I'm not being even-handed....
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obviously with liberal help from wikipedia
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Balfour Declaration: A statement issued in 1917, during World War I, by Britain's Foreign Secretary and former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. The statement announced support of a "Jewish National Homeland." It was, however, not an official declaration but rather something in a letter delivered from Secretary Balfour to Lord Rothschild, the de facto leader of Britain's Jewish community. The statement read:
"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."
There is much vaguery in the Balfour Delcaration.
Firstly: as ex-PM, Balfour was a great rival to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He was kept out of inner government meetings and perhaps had insufficient authority to make such a statement. Perhaps he made it as a way of confounding Lloyd George's ability to keep a government together.
Secondly: it may have been a cynical political calculation from the Lloyd George government directly from the Prime Minister. There would have been any number of reasons for it, most obvious among them being that the Russian Revolution had happened less than a month earlier, and the British government would have been worried that the Zionist movement - largely socialist, would try to foment a Soviet-like revolution in Palestine.
Thirdly: the term 'Jewish national homeland' leaves at least a bit of ambiguity for 'which' Jews. Is it a national homeland for worldwide Jewry or for only the Jews already in the British Mandate of Palestine? While it seems to this writer to contain not much ambiguity that it meant worldwide Jewry - after all, Europe wanted to be rid of its Jews for centuries, Israel's enemies have made much of the idea that Balfour never specified which Jews would be allowed to live there.
Fourthly: the Balfour Declaration was extremely clear that in the formation of a Jewish homeland, nothing should be done to infringe on the rights of non-Jews living within Palestinian borders.
The fourth point, however, created still greater ambiguities, because it said that nothing in the formation of Israel should create harm to Jews living in other lands. However, in the four years after the State of Israel was declared, a total of 260,000 Jews left the Muslim lands, including 90% of Jews in Iraq, Yemen and Libya. It is debatable whether the majority of the refugee/emigres were forcibly expelled, but it is also debatable whether a majority of Palestinians were as well.
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British Mandate of Palestine (or League of Nations Mandate, or Mandatory Palestine): in April 1920, the League of Nations - a post WWI predecessor to the United Nations - assigned British administration to the territory of Palestine (now comprising the State of Israel and Palestinian territories), and Transjordan (now simply known as Jordan). The mandate was given with an end in mind of establishing both a Palestinian state and a Jewish homeland.
Due to the Balfour Declaration, it was assumed by many that the British would rule on the Jewish side with a heavy hand, an assumption thought born out by the appointment of Sir Herbert Samuel as its first High Commissioner, a British politician of long experience who came by his knowledge of the Middle East by being a Jew and Zionist. Nevertheless, Britain only allowed for the immigration of a little less than 300,000 Jews over their twenty-eight year administration in Palestine, almost all of which happened in the first thirteen years. When matters became untenable to Jews throughout Europe, Britain closed the doors to Palestine almost entirely.
Mandatory Palestine experienced dozens of riots, untold numbers of conspiracies, proliferant rival organizations and insurgencies taking every permutation and side. It is impossible to explain the events of the British Mandate with any brevity, but if Britain had any perpetual designs on retaining this patch of earth as an imperial territory, those designs were quickly disabused by their administrative experience.
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The Peel Commission: A 'Royal Commission of Inquiry' established in 1936 to investigate the causes of civil disquiet in Palestine. In July 1937, the commission published conclusions come to by the entire world decades before it became official government policy:that a binational Palestine of Jews and Arabs was unworkable in reality. The Peel Commission recommended a partition. While Jewish interests were divided over whether to accept a partitioned state, Arab interests were uniform in rejecting it. This was the first in a long series of disastrous political decisions by the Arab side of this question. While some historians of note claim that the Zionists who accepted the Peel Commission did so as a mere step on the way to conquering the whole of Palestine, one wonders why Arab politicians felt so secure in their position that they would not see the necessity of playing the same political game.
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The White Paper (alternately The White Paper of 1939): in 1939, the government of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain issued a policy paper that simultaneously called for the establishment of a Jewish national home in a Palestinian state within the next ten years. It limited further immigration of Jews to 75,000 in the next five years, with immigration thereafter to be determined by the Arab majority. It further forbade Jews from buying land in all but 5% of the mandate.
The White Paper provides still more ambiguity because it does not specify that the state itself would be Jewish, or if there was simply to be a Jewish province within a larger Palestinian state. Palestine's Jewish population understandably rejected the White Paper and its issue led to Jewish riots on British government property.
However, the White Paper was also rejected by the Palestinian Arab political parties, who deemed it too sympathetic to the Jewish population.
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'The Partition Plan' (alternately 'UN Partition Plan for Palestine; or UN Resolution 181): A 1947 United Nations resolution recommending the creation of separate states for Arab and Jewish peoples in Mandatory Palestine with the creation of Jerusalem as a stateless, international city, to be completed within the next year. Religious and minority rights would be protected within each, and both would exist in an economic confederation with each other.
Palestinian Arab and pan-Arab organizations of influence roundly rejected the partition. Palestine's Arab population comprised 2/3rds of Palestine's population. Jews only owned 6-7% of the land - albeit Jews were prohibited from owning much of it. Arabs therefore thought it unacceptable that Jews should get much of Palestine. This partition, however, would grant 56% of Palestine to the Jewish state, including the highly Arab city of Jaffa (Yafa in Arabic, Yafo in Hebrew), and was therefore accused of being a pro-Zionist document. However, this plan was formulated by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), a committee boycotted by Palestine's Arab representatives for the reason that it granted an independent Jewish state's existence. In retrospect, there could have been no greater blow to Palestinian sovereignty than their rejection of the Partition Plan.
There were enormous international campaigns about the adaptation of Resolution 181, perhaps unprecedented.
For:
In the United States, congressional districts containing lots of Jewish voters swung control of the House of Representatives, causing President Truman to place Jewish interests at a high premium. One transcribed bit leaked from a closed meeting of the Zionist Emergency Council of America reads "Under no circumstanees should any of us believe or think we had won because of the devotion of the American Government to our cause. We had won because of the sheer pressure of political logistics that was applied by the Jewish leadership in the United States." President Truman later noted that the pressure exerted upon him was unlike anything he had ever experienced in his presidency and justified yielding to it by saying "In all of my political experience I don't ever recall the Arab vote swinging a close election." Undersecretary of State Robert A. Lovett, working under the anti-Israel Secretary of State George Marshall, claimed that the UN delegations were subject to unremitting pressure of bribes and threats, and when Marshall refused to change his policy, the pressure went directly to the White House. Prime Minister Nehru of India noted the millions with which India was bribed and how India's Ambassador to the UN, his sister, was threatened with her life 'unless she voted right' - India nevertheless voted against. France's UN delegate alleged that Bernard Baruch, longtime financial advisor to Roosevelt and Truman, implied that he would make Truman block badly needed postwar financial aid to France if they did not vote for the partition plan. Liberia noted that they were threatened with foreign aid cuts and by pressure from Harvey Firestone, President of Firestone Natural Rubber Company, that he would withdraw his investments.
Against:
The head of the Egyptian delegation, Muhammad Hussein Heykai Pasha, declared in a UN speech that "the lives of 1,000,000 Jews in Moslem countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state... if the U.N decide to amputate a part of Palestine in order to establish a Jewish state, no force on earth could prevent blood from flowing there… Moreover… no force on earth can confine it to the borders of Palestine itself… Jewish blood will necessarily be shed elsewhere in the Arab world… to place in certain and serious danger a million Jews." Iraq's Prime Minister, Nuri al-Said made an assurance that if the United Nations measure was not 'satisfactory', 'several measures would be taken against Jews in all Arab countries.' The former secretary of the Palestine Arab Congress declared that "The blood will flow like rivers in the Middle East." While the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Fadel Jamal, made the statement "Partition imposed against the will of the majority of the people will jeopardize peace and harmony in the Middle East. Not only the uprising of the Arabs of Palestine is to be expected, but the masses in the Arab world cannot be restrained."
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Resolution 194 (alternately United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, see also 'Right of return' in future posts): The resolution defining the terms of final settlement in the First Arab-Israeli War. Article 11 was meant to define the timetable of when, or whether, Arabs must be returned to their homes after completion of the war. It did the opposite.
Article 11 states: "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible."
The legal ramifications of this article have lasted the greater part of a century: the meaning of "homes", the meaning of "compensation", the meaning of "loss of or damage to property", the meaning of "Governments or authorities responsible.", even the meaning of "international law" and especially the meaning of "live at peace" is endlessly disputed.
All Arab states originally voted against this resolution, as they believed to vote for it would recognize the State of Israel's legitimacy, only to reverse their position six months later when they found it useful after victory against the State of Israel was unmanageable. The Jewish representatives from Palestine voted for the resolution and even promised on the floor of the UN that the future State of Israel would carry it out. Neither side of this resolution acquitted themselves with honor, but honor is a practice for which neither history nor politics grants much room.
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