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History As It Happens
Balfour's Bloody Legacy
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Martin DeCaro
As it happens September 16, 2025 Balfour's Bloody Legacy On November 2, 1917, the.
- [00:38]
Victor Kattan
20 year Zionist effort to colonize Palestine.
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Martin DeCaro
Was crowned with success.
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Victor Kattan
Although in times of comparative peace, Jews.
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Narrator (British Pathe Newsreel)
And Arabs live side by side and go about their business in the old City of Jerusalem with apparent calm, beneath the surface bitter enmity has continued to smolder for years.
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Arab Representative / Protester
The present Arab attack on the Jews is another and unhappily periodic attempt to undermine the right of the Jews to resettle in Palest as Balfour Declaration Gives Renewed Hope to Jews of Promised Land against all principles the British government imposed the Balfour Declaration, which is abhorred by all Arabs in the Near East.
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Martin DeCaro
108 years ago, the British Cabinet agreed to support the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Today, a legal petition by Palestinians to the British government is seeking an apology and possible reparations. Is today's war in Gaza the result of a 67 word declaration issued in 1917? That's next as we dive into the origins of the Israeli Palestinian catastrophe as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
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Victor Kattan
I mean, when it's a piece of paper, it's meaningless in the sense that it's just a piece of paper. It's just a letter to a private citizen from a government minister. But it's what they do next which is a problem because they take the text of that declaration, they, they put it in an instrument which they call a mandate, and they try and get the other principal allied powers to agree to that policy. And then they pursue that policy for a good 20, 30 years until they reverse it in the late 1930s. And so the petition that we look at, so we look at all these issues, the League of Nations never actually agreed to the Balfour Declaration.
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Martin DeCaro
Historian Avi Schlaim says the Israeli Palestinian conflict was made in Britain. The tiny Zionist minority was enabled by Britain in 1917 to embark on the systematic takeover of Palestine, a process that continues to this day. He says the current war in Gaza is the direct result of the Balfour Declaration. That is. Avi Schlaim in an interview with Middle East Eye, the historian was one of several experts who contributed to a 400 page legal petition filed with the British government accusing it of violating international law in the three decades before the creation of the Jewish State of Israel. International legal expert Victor Khattan of the University of Nottingham also assisted the 14 Palestinian petitioners who want the government to formally acknowledge Britain's role, issue a sincere apology and provide meaningful reparations to the Palestinian people. As stated on their website britainoespalestine.org where you'll find this video with the stroke.
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Narrator / Reporter
Of a pen, the British gave Palestine away, unleashing a century of occupation, oppression and genocide. In 1917, British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour promised the Palestinian homeland to the Jewish people. But it was never his to give. Now it is time for accountability.
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Martin DeCaro
So this is quite an origin story. A 67 word declaration written as a letter to a private citizen has led to the horrors unfolding in Gaza today, the argument goes, as the Israeli military continues to pulverize Palestinian life to dust.
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Victor Kattan
Fida had been prepared preparing food when she was told of an Israeli evacuation order. They'd been gathering their things together just outside when the strikes came in minutes later.
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Narrator / Reporter
The Israeli military's assault on Gaza City in recent weeks has been notable for the way it has targeted and demolished tower blocks. This video was filmed today, the latest in a series of strikes.
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Martin DeCaro
Just the other day, the former chief of the Israeli military, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said more than one in 10 Palestinians in Gaza has been killed or injured since the war began. That is roughly 200,000 people and far higher than most estimates. On November 2, 1917, in a letter to Lord Rothschild, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote, his Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors 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. I should be grateful, balfour said, if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation. Well, as we know it was of course not so simple because in the secret Sykes Picot Agreement of 1916, the British and French had agreed to carve up the Middle east, then under Ottoman control, for themselves and the British had also made promises to the Arabs under Grand Sharif Hussein. Exactly what was promised remains contested, to persuade them to revolt against Ottoman rule during the First World War. Maybe you've seen the movie Lawrence of Arabia. In the conclusion to his book the Balfour Declaration, the historian Jonathan Schneer writes, wartime British officials who had done so much to facilitate the Zionist and Arab movements and had never aimed primarily to keep the peace in Palestine. They aimed to win the First World War and to maintain their country's place in the world. Here are the primary motivations, although not the only ones, for all the British dealings with Grand Sharif Hussein and the Zionist Kaim Weizmann. Of course, neither man nor any of their followers acted as mere pawns in British hands. Zionists and Arabs fought fiercely and tenaciously for their goals during the war and after. But we cannot be surprised at the results of so complex and fraught a process as the lead up to the Balfour Declaration. Schneer writes. The most famous result was the Declaration itself. Zionists and many others have viewed it ever since as a terrific achievement, a foundation stone along the way to the establishment of modern Israel. Many Arabs, on the other hand, have seen it as a terrible setback, the real starting point of their dispossession and misery. And it was foreseeable. Listen to this British Pathe newsreel footage of an unnamed Arab man outlining grievances against the British government in 1936, the year the Arab revolt in Palestine began.
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Arab Representative / Protester
The main case of the Arabs is against the British government's policy in Palestine, a policy which if continued will surely have as a result the Republic of the Arabs by the Jews. This policy is not only contrary to the pledge given by His Britannic Majesty's government to the late King Hussein in the year 1915 for the establishment of a completely independent state, but is also not in accordance with the fourth point of President Wilson's 14 points calling for the self determination of all people against all principles. The British government imposed the Balfour Declaration, which is abhorred by all Arabs in the near east and on favoring the establishment of a national home for Jews, forgot intentionally to safeguard the civil rights of the non Jewish population. The Arabs who decided on a general and a complete strike until the total and immediate stoppage of Jewish emigration is brought about and until the government introduces an essential change in its present policy.
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Martin DeCaro
Now, during the mandate period, 1920 to 1948, the British did at different times try to limit Jewish immigration to the Mandate, but they never rescinded their support for Zionism in the Balfour Declaration. There were imperial reasons for this support. But for the Zionists, as we just mentioned, it served as the basis to create a Jewish state on Arab land, ultimately undermining British control as Palestine was swallowed by violence.
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Narrator (British Pathe Newsreel)
A guardian of law and order looks out over the old walled city of Jerusalem as once again the irresistible force of Zionism meets the immovable object of Arab nationalism. Among the blood stained hills of the Holy Land, armored cars with reinforced screens patrol the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem.
- [09:30]
Martin DeCaro
Victor Khattan is Assistant professor in Public International Law at the University of Nottingham School of Law. As mentioned, he contributed to the Palestinian legal petition now before the British government. Our conversation next. But why don't you subscribe to History as it happens to skip the ads ad, free listening to every episode for $5 a month. Plus you'll receive access to the entire catalog of 500 episodes and and exclusive access to bonus episodes of the World's Best Historians about the origins of today's headlines. Go to historyasithappens.com Subscribing just takes a couple of minutes. Victor Kattan, welcome back to the show.
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Victor Kattan
Thank you, Martin. It's good to be back.
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Martin DeCaro
It has been a bit. You were with me last year. We discussed the 1947 partition vote. What is the purpose of this 400 page legal document that you were one of four expert contributors to? What do the petitioners hope to achieve realistically?
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Victor Kattan
Thank you, Martin. So the 400 page legal document takes the form of a petition which is addressed to the British government, 14 petitioners in all. But the lead petitioner is a man called Mr. Maneeb Al Masri, who was actually shot and wounded as a young boy protesting British policy in Palestine in the 1940s.
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Martin DeCaro
So he must be quite old. He's 91 years old.
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Victor Kattan
91 years old now, yes. And he's been joined by another 13 petitioners of a similar, similar age.
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Martin DeCaro
So what do they hope to realistically achieve here?
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Victor Kattan
So it had a number of asks and probably the most important one is that it's requesting reparations. The most important being an apology, a public official apology by hmg, His Majesty's Government to the people of Palestine for the violations of international law that we catalog in the 400 page petition. And we've asked him to read that apology out in the House of Commons, in Parliament, in, in London. And we also want to open a dialogue with the government about what other forms of reparation might be due, although we don't go into detail on what we mean by that. But the broader, bigger objective is to start or provoke a national conversation in the UK about Britain's colonial past in Palestine because it's not something that's so well known. It's. There's a lot of ignorance about how the conflict began and why it continues. And we don't teach colonial history or we teach very little colonial history in British schools. I was educated in the British system and we learned about, you know, the kings, we learned about the World wars, about the Holocaust, but we were never taught anything about Britain about. I was never taught about slavery or Britain's colonial past, for example.
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Martin DeCaro
That's astonishing, considering Great Britain used to be one of the largest colonial powers in human history. And you're not being taught about colonialism. That's surprising.
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Victor Kattan
Exactly. Yeah, especially not about Palestine and probably not even Ireland. I mean, some schools might touch on it, but I don't think it's a major part of the history curriculum. It certainly wasn't at my school. And I spoke to my colleagues. They weren't taught this at school. Ivers.
- [12:48]
Martin DeCaro
So the petition really focuses in on the Balfour Declaration or that period of time. We're going to get to BALFOUR and that 1917 declaration in a minute. But let's just return to this relic of the past and how Great Britain came to be in control, if you will, of this liver of land in the Middle east, something called a mandate. So that's not quite autonomy. Well, it's definitely not autonomy or independence for the subject peoples, but it's not full imperial control, if you know what I mean. Following the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles, I'll talk about the.
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Victor Kattan
Mandate system in general, and then I'll explain why the mandate for Palestine was quite peculiar. Because we make some new arguments, believe it or not, some new discoveries in this petition, and one concerns the Palestine Mandate. But to roll back a bit and explain what the mandate system is. So after the First World War, what they call the principal allied powers, those are the powers that won the war, ended up controlling the colonies of those states that lost the war, principally Germany and the Ottoman Empire. In the old days, the old form of annexation was simply to take control and rule it as though it was part of your own sovereign territory. But at the end of the First World War, due to developments in Russia and the United States, so the Bolshevik Revolution calling for the national self determination for the toiling masses. And then, of course, Woodrow Wilson had a slightly different conception, what he called self, the idea of consent that those who are ruled should have the right to choose who rules them and their system of government. And so these ideas were formulated, were being discussed towards the end of the First World War. And so they came up with a system that wasn't full blown colonialism, that sovereignty wasn't acquired by the victorious powers. They had a right only of administration. And they were supposed to rule the territories as a trust, I. E. For the benefits of the people's concern. So it was like a halfway house.
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Martin DeCaro
Yeah, until those peoples were ready to rule themselves. Obviously that never came about for the Arabs of Palestine. And we don't need to jump ahead here though, to 1947, 1948. We covered that ground the first time you were on. But let's just return to this period though. The mandate begins in 1920, officially, but prior to this, Woodrow Wilson commissioned, well, a commission to go to the former Ottoman territories to ask people, so what do you want? Who do you want to rule your area of the world? And what did that commission find and why were its findings ignored?
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Victor Kattan
Thanks, Martin. Good question. So it was the Inter Allied Commission of Inquiry on mandates in Turkey. I think it was supposed to be an Inter Allied commission originally. So it was supposed to be American, British and French, but the British and French got cold feet so they didn't join in. And so it became basically just an American commission. They traveled to what was then called Syria, Greater Syria, which included Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan. They did a number of things, but the most important ones to ascertain what the people of the territories desired. And of course they desired first and foremost independence. But failing that, if they had to have a mandatory power, they preferred, this is interesting, the United States, because it wasn't a traditional colonial power like the others. And they also expressed very vehement opposition to the Zionist project, that is project of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It was almost universal opposition to that. As I explained, the French and the British and I think the Italians weren't keen on this commission at all. And so it was kind of suppressed and it was never published until Britain assumed the mandate for itself. Of course, the Americans never ended up joining the League of Nations. So it was kind of forgotten at the time.
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Martin DeCaro
And the British are there because during the First World War they were fighting a battle against the Ottoman Empire. 1916, 1917, the British realized that unless they controlled all the Sinai area, that the Suez Canal could be endangered. Their canal, which was so important to British commerce. Right. So that explains the geopolitical interest for the British. 1917, the British finally march into Jerusalem. Right.
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Victor Kattan
Actually with an Anglo French campaign, but the British were the main army campaign started in what is now Saudi Arabia. They wanted to keep the Red Sea and as he said, the Suez Canal open because it was the route to the crown jewel in the empire, which was India and the East Indies. So, so that was the main route for trade and everything else. But there were also other reasons. Status, prestige, holding the holy. Some of the holiest places, you know, Saudi Arabia has the two holiest places of Islam, but the holiest places in Christendom are in the Holy Land, Jerusalem, Nazareth and other places. So there was a prestige factor. There is some discussion, but not as well known. They had discovered deposits of oil in northern Iraq by this time. And so there were proposals and in fact one of those proposals, they did construct an oil pipeline to Haifa and Beirut that went through Syria. So there were, there were discussions. Sykes Picot, in fact alludes to this.
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Martin DeCaro
Yeah, we're going to get to the.
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Victor Kattan
Boundaries of those states.
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Martin DeCaro
Yeah, we're going to get to Sykes Picot in a second. But yeah, there's so much here to untangle. You know, is there ever lots, Is it ever easy to discuss the history of the Middle East? You just keep going back and back and back. But we're getting closer to Lord Balfour here. The British occupy the former Ottoman district of Jerusalem and of Acre and Balka in the Beirut governorate. And since these areas roughly coincided with the historic region of Palestine, the British adopt that name for its mandate, that is its governorship of the region as authorized by the League of Nations.
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Victor Kattan
I'll come back to that.
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Martin DeCaro
Yeah, what about Zionism before World War I, before the First World War. So we're talking now, years before British troops march into Jerusalem. Was the British government interested in Zionism.
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Victor Kattan
Like we just discussed, the strategic interest, the Suez Canal. The Middle east was a key nodule in the emerging imperial economy. There was also quantum quantities, vast quantities of oil, some of which hadn't been discovered, some of which had been discovered. They were the holy places. But there was also this political movement that emerged in Europe, mainly Eastern Europe, but in also in the United States and in some parts of Western Europe, following the large scale movement of a 1 1/2 million million Jews fleeing persecution from what was called the Pale of Settlement to Western Europe and the United States, principally the United States of America. As with any mass migration of people, we can see it today in our world today, it leads to friction and complaints, economic insecurity, racism, xenophobia. And this happened in the UK in the early 1900s. And it's around this time that an Austro Hungarian Jewish journalist, Dr. Fyodor Herzl, comes up with this idea to create a Jewish state in Palestine that will serve two purposes. One is the imperial factor, being loyal to the empire, which helps them establish that state, but also to solve what they call the immigration problem, to encourage the steady stream of migrants fleeing persecution to Europe and encourage them to travel to Palestine instead. And this is what attracts Balfour. So Balfour, before he was a foreign secretary in 1917, had been prime minister in the early 1900s. And Lloyd George, who was the Prime Minister when the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, was a solicitor and a member of Parliament. And he was the key connection with the Zionist Organization because he was a solicitor as well. And he had drafted a plan to establish a Jewish homeland in Kenya, in East Africa. It was called the Uganda Plan, because at that time they hadn't distinguished between these different places. And the idea was to establish a homeland for Jewish colonization. So what you see is that this idea, this idea of encouraging migration out of Europe to Africa, or there were plans for Argentina, North Africa, the, the Sinai, but eventually Palestine, because of course, that's where the holy places came. The imperial interest to support that for domestic political reasons kind of coalesced around these key figures. Chaim Weissmann Herzl, who then passed away Balfour and Lloyd George. Now, of course, Palestine wasn't an imperial possession. It couldn't be promised to the Zionist Organization during the debates on what they called alien immigration in the early 1900s. But by the time we reach the end of the First World War, 1916, 1917, they realize that Britain is marching, if you like, to Jerusalem. And this project, this project can be realized. And so you see the same figures who are involved in these early debates coming out and supporting Zionism for various reasons. There are other reasons, but the only logical one I can think for why the British government would support Jewish immigration for 30 years to Palestine is, is because that was the original idea. And Herzl had articulated this idea of encouraging migration in his public testimony to the Royal Commission on alien immigration in 1902. So it had been something that was articulated and he'd met with the Colonial Secretary as well to, to discuss his idea.
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Martin DeCaro
Some British officials were genuine Zionists, though, right?
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Victor Kattan
How do you mean by genuine?
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Martin DeCaro
Well, that's, that's what we're getting at here. You're saying that some of them simply wanted to encourage the immigration that way instead of this way. But David Lloyd George, for instance, who was the leader of Great Britain in the End of World War I, the end years there to the victory. He was a Zionist, right?
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Victor Kattan
Well, there were Christian evangelicals. Christian evangelism has also had this strong connection to, as it does today, sense of returning the Jewish. Yes, as it does today, returning the Jewish people to the Promised Land. So that was. That was also a factor that encouraged it as well. But I would suggest that when you know that Lloyd George was also the solicitor for the Zionist Organization and involved in encouraging migration to Uganda, I mean, Uganda wasn't a promised land as far as I'm aware. You see that it was not the only reason.
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Martin DeCaro
I don't remember Uganda in the Bible. So, as you know from being on the show, the aim of my podcast, if I hope to accomplish anything, is to get people to understand the origins of current events without overdrawing the lines or the parallels or the echoes. But there is such a thing as cause and effect, even if we can't draw a direct line between something that happened in 1917 and what is going on today. Although the aforementioned Avi Schlaim, the historian who contributed to your work here, did say the current war in Gaza is the direct result of the Balfour Declaration, I want to return to that question at the end of our conversation about Great Britain and its commitment to Zionism. Just briefly, Zionist, or really Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe begins in the late 19th century. The first wave, or what is called an alias, if I'm pronouncing that word correctly, were Russians and Romanians. The second wave began in 1904, according to Jonathan Schneer in his excellent book the Balfour Declaration, on the eve of the First World War. When the second wave of immigration comes to an end, about 85,000 Jews lived in Palestine. That was about one ninth of the entire population. Of those 85,000, perhaps half were self consciously Jewish nationalists or Zionists. Perhaps 12,000 lived in agricultural settlements. So we're talking about a tiny part of the population. And maybe at this time, well, not maybe, definitely the Arabs of this region are saying, who gave the British the right to give away our land to these other people from Europe?
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Victor Kattan
Absolutely. And I spent a lot of time this Week with Mr. Muneeb Al Masri, who's the main petitioner, who's behind this campaign. As he said, He's 91 years old and I sat down with him and this still. It is this issue that still bugs him more than anything, that upsets him more than anything. How did the British have the right to. He calls it a horrible document because of the way it describes the Palestinians of the non Jewish population only have civil and religious rights and it conflates Judaism and Zionism and the British kind of arrogate for themselves the rights to determine the eventual political identity of the country. No knowing all this time that more than 90% of the population that's been rooted there for centuries is Palestinian Arab or Ottoman Arab and who were resolutely opposed to losing their identity, their homes and their livelihoods to, to make way for a problem that was essentially European.
- [25:33]
Martin DeCaro
And I should slightly amend what I said there because chronology is critically important. I was referring to waves of Jewish immigration prior to the Balfour Declaration. And then of course comes the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and that is when the Arabs of that part of the world were probably asking so all right, we already have some immigrants but now we have a colonial power, one of the victors of this great war saying all right, we need more immigration. It wasn't just immigration. Zionism had a certain character to it that chafed the indigenous population. Right. In his book, Jonathan Schneer says some of this was typical antisemitism or nativism or just how anybody would react when you have foreigners coming into your country who are also claiming that it's their homeland too. But there was, how would you put it, more legitimate or understandable reasons to chafe at the waves of immigration that Britain was sanctioning. Right. It wasn't just bigotry and absolutely it.
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Victor Kattan
Wasn'T just immigration either. It was colonization. They were supporting the colonization of the land. They were supporting the establishment of states or governmental bodies of governmental structures to take over the land. So it's not just people coming and you know, they're different, they speak a different language. Look, they look funny. They're coming with a state backed project to create a nation that's completely different, that will eventually come to dominate and overtake your land. So there was the Jewish Colonial Trust, there were banks, there was land acquisition on a large scale. There were labor laws that only for Jewish workers. A lot of reasons that caused the grievance. All the concessions, the big public concessions that had been awarded by the Ottoman Empire to other companies or then awarded to Jewish businessmen. The land was slowly, and the resources were slowly being acquired by foreign Jewish businessmen. So it wasn't, it wasn't surprising that this greated, always the aim of establishing a, a Jewish homeland at some point in the future which, which the Zionists always said meant a state where they would be the majority and they would be the rulers and the Palestinians would be how Is it in the Bible? Drawers of water and hewers of wood.
- [27:45]
Martin DeCaro
But Palestinian nationalism at this time, there wasn't an idea among the Arabs of Palestine to create a Palestinian state. Or was there? Or was the idea that there'd be Palestinian autonomy within a Greater Syria.
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Victor Kattan
So I think initially people saw themselves, well, they're Arabs, they speak Arabic, they saw themselves as Assyrian. The division was created by the British. I mean, some scholars like Rashid Shali point out there was an emerging Palestinian national identity. In the early 1900s, were newspapers, you know, speaking of Palestine, this word did exist. It's a very old word, Palestine, by the way, much older than most people may appreciate, going back centuries. But the idea really was your Holy Land, your Jerusalem, the holy places and a local identity. But you're right in the sense that it wasn't till the Brits came. That's why the Balfour Declaration is so important. And they came with a state backed project that really is what caused a reaction against it and birthed, if you like, gave impetus to Palestinian nationalism.
- [28:45]
Martin DeCaro
I'll quote Jonathan Schneer's work one more time. He says every significant historical development has roots that may be traced back indefinitely. He says the Balfour Declaration was not in and of itself the source of trouble in a land that previously had been more or less at peace. But nor was it a mere signpost on a road heading undividedly toward a cliff. No one can say, he says, what the course of events in Palestine might have been without it. What did come was the product of forces and factors entirely unforeseen. Unforeseen. That's a curious choice of words because pretty quickly after the Balfour Declaration, Arabs started to complain to the British officials. Right, please stop. Please stop allowing all this immigration.
- [29:32]
Victor Kattan
Right, well, there was loads. I mean, I've seen the telegrams in the British archives. I mean, it's almost immediate and not just from Jerusalem where you would expect it, where there were protests, but from Palestinian diaspora communities all over the world, from New York, even the telegrams from Santiago to Chile, from, from everywhere. Because there was a migration of Palestinian, mainly Christians, during the collapse of the Ottoman rule. Many of them ended up in the Americas.
- [29:55]
Martin DeCaro
Another factor here too, Victor, was multiple promises made to different people. So the Balfour Declaration of 1917 promises a Jewish homeland as long as the rights of the indigenous population are not violated. Right. They had to be respected. And I should say there were already Jews living, of course, in this part of the world prior to Zionist or Jewish immigration in the late 19th century. But it's A very small part of the population. And they were not seeking to create a new state there.
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Victor Kattan
They were integrated with the local community.
- [30:27]
Martin DeCaro
Yes, exactly. So that is an important fact. But anyway, getting back to these multiple promises. So we have the Balfour Declaration of 1917, but we already had the Sykes Picot Agreement. We're going to open up the encyclopedia here. Victor Kattan, you're going to help us. But also something called the McMahon Hussein Correspondence. Tell us first who Sharif Hussein was and why Arabs who followed him believed that they had been betrayed.
- [30:51]
Victor Kattan
Good questions again. Right, so we've got to get the chronology right here. Balfour Declarations, 1917. It comes after the change of government as well in the uk. So the change of government and which brings to power Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, guys who are involved in those debates in the early 1900s on alien immigration. Which is one of the reasons why, again, I would suggest this is very important, a strand of thinking prior to that. The previous British government were kind of classic imperialists who just wanted to win the war and to control the territory and made alliances with the Arab rulers, the most important of which was the Emir, the Prince, the king of Mecca in the Hijaz. They wanted to foment a revolution internally within the Ottoman Empire. So of course the Ottoman Empire, still the sovereign of Mecca and Medina at that time, very important to its legitimacy. And so it's done in secret. And they're basically sounding each other out. They want to see if the Emir is willing to raise an army secretly with the help of British advisors and British modern military equipment, to foment a revolution within the Ottoman Empire to hasten its collapse. In this correspondence, which is referred to as a Hussein Makmahon correspondence, macmahon being the British High Commissioner, Egypt, which was responsible for that region, the Emir wanted, of course, they want something in exchange. You want me to commit. Commit treason. You want me to betray the Ottoman Empire. What's in it for me? Right. And you also want me to issue a declaration against the Ottoman Empire. You want me to take all these steps. I want something in exchange. And what I want is I want to have an Arab kingdom that unites all the Arab speaking peoples of the territory, which goes beyond modern, what we now call Saudi Arabia to include what is now called Jordan, Iraq and Syria. There were a number of letters you can imagine in those days. It was by courier, secretly by courier, traveling across the land in the sea. And there was a dispute about the extent of those territories. And the dispute always concerned whether the areas of which were non Arab or French interests were to be excluded. And as Arab nationalists have always argued, that meant what we now refer to as Mount Lebanon. It did not include what we now call the Holy Land, Palestine, Israel, which was included in the pledge. And it kind of makes sense not only because, as we've already said, 90% of the population was. Was Arab Arabic speaking, but because it was that important link of hol. Places. So you have to remember the caravan routes. Yeah. For the, for the pilgrimage to Mecca would go Damascus, Jerusalem, Medina, Mecca. That was a route for centuries. It didn't make sense to cut off. So they. The correspondence refers to the holy places. It wasn't just Mecca Medina, but it was that route. It also included Jerusalem, which was one of the important stop on the pilgrimage, as was Hebron and the other holy places. So the Arab claim was always that it included Palestine. The Balfour Declaration then betrayed that because it promised the Jewish people in the world the same territory which had already been promised to the King.
- [33:45]
Martin DeCaro
And secretly in the Sykes Picot Accord, the British and French had a different plan in mind. You're just explaining there, really, the story that is often referred to as Lawrence of Arabia.
- [34:00]
Victor Kattan
No prisoners. No prisoners.
- [34:05]
Martin DeCaro
Lawrence of Arabia is a great movie. It is not good history. There is a book, there is a book I read a few years ago about Faisal, who led the uprising by Ali Alawi.
- [34:18]
Victor Kattan
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- [34:20]
Martin DeCaro
Faisal of Iraq. I was surprised. I didn't think I would enjoy such a long biography about a figure like Faisal, but it was terrific. So we have all these different promises made and so Arabs feeling betrayed by the British Empire, you know, let's go back now to the actual Declaration. Who was Alfred Balfour and what were they hoping to accomplish with the declaration in 1917? When people issue declarations like this, I often wonder, historically speaking, take the Declaration of independence in 1776. How far ahead historical actors are thinking, how far ahead they can see the consequences, what their intent is, or if they care at all about what might come about 10, 15, 20 years down the road.
- [35:05]
Victor Kattan
Good question, but I'll start with the first one, who's Balfour? So Arthur Balfour, at that time, he was a Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom. He came from an aristocratic family. He went to Cambridge University. They were all religious in their own ways. He had links to Scotland, he meddled in eugenics as a young man. He had very racist views, we would say today of non Europeans, in particularly Africans, Aborigines and Indians. He had a history, a checkered, dark history in Ireland for the Troubles There it was known as bloody Balfour. And he was a very wealthy man, but he inherited his money. He didn't make it. He inherited it from his family's fortunes in India. His name is, is associated with declaration because it's signed by him, it's in his name. It's dedicated to Lord Rothschild of the Rothschild dynasty. Very wealthy and still is, I believe, wealthy. Jewish banking, historically, I think there are banking families. And what's important about the Balfour Declaration is not only support for a Jewish national home in Palestine, it's the fact that the government then actually proceeds to follow this promise. I mean, when it's a piece of paper, it's meaningless in the sense that it's just a piece of paper. It's just a letter to a private citizen from a government minister. But it's what they do next which is a problem, because they take the text of that declaration, they put it in an instrument which they call a mandate, and they try and get the other principal allied powers to agree to that policy, and then they pursue that policy for, for a good 20, 30 years until they reverse it in the late 1930s. And so the petition that we look at, so we look at all these issues, but what we found really intriguingly, and I have to thank the work of John Quigley, the professor at Ohio State University, for his work. The League of Nations never actually agreed to the Balfour Declaration. The principal allied powers agreed to it in 1920 at the. What was called the San Remo Conference. But at that time, everyone was expecting that the Treaty of Severus with the Ottoman Empire would be ratified and would deal with the issue. But, but unfortunately for the allied powers and the Zionists, there were reversals in the war in Anatolia. And Ataturk kind of kicks out the Greeks and refuses to ratify that treaty. So they have no legal basis to pursue the policy. They then have to renegotiate a new treaty called the Treaty of Lausanne. But the Turks at this point are in a more powerful position than they refuse. You will not find any reference to the Balfour Declaration in the Treaty of Lausanne, unlike in the Treaty of Severus. So they refuse. And so the question about what happened to sovereignty is, is then left open, and that treaty is, is negotiated three years later in 1923, but it doesn't enter into force until 1924. So what basis, legally, I'm talking about here, what legal basis could the British government force the Balfour Declaration down the throats of the Arabs? And we basically say they, there was only one way they did it. And that was through military occupation, military rule.
- [38:03]
Martin DeCaro
Part of your petition is that the British committed abuses, committed war crimes. Right.
- [38:08]
Victor Kattan
It's a self imposed mandates. And they basically, although it's supposed to be a mandate, as administered in this particular way, they use colonial instruments to support British rule. So there's a High commissioner, but there's no legislative council ever established. There's no symbol of any representative government. He's more like a dictator. And he rules as we go into the petition, he rules essentially eventually through what we call emergency regulations. Because obviously the Palestinians are getting more, more and more upset as more Jewish migrants come into the country and they fear losing, losing their country. So they revolt. There's a revolt against British rule, a very serious revolt. And the British government has to respond with draconian legislation and sending soldiers. So at one point, I think there were well over a hundred thousand soldiers. There were more soldiers in Palestine, which is the size of Wales, than there were in any part, any other part of the British Empire.
- [39:02]
Martin DeCaro
This is the 1936 revolt or something earlier.
- [39:05]
Victor Kattan
Okay, this is the 36 for three year revolts. Actually, there's a film. I don't know if you've heard about it, Martin. There's a new film coming out. I think it's been shown at the Toronto Film Festival and it's coming out in London in about a month's time. And it's, it's not a documentary. It's actually. It's a feature film with famous actors, but they're dramatizing the events called Palestine 36.
- [39:25]
Martin DeCaro
Well, I'm reading a book actually called Palestine 1936, a similar title to the movie. I don't think the movie, though is based on this book. You know, that's 1936. That's 16 years after the mandate and almost 20 years after the declaration. There was violence, there were tensions, there were problems before. Right.
- [39:44]
Victor Kattan
It was the Haycraft Commission of Inquiry, the Palin Commission of Inquiry. So during the military government, there was opposition that had to be suppressed. There were arrests, there were killings, there were demonstrations. So these commissions all said that the cause of the violence was Britain's support for Zionism. And these findings by courts, court martials, based on evidence, et cetera, were suppressed by the government. Didn't want the world to know that their policy was unpopular, that there was actually opposition to it from the indigenous inhabitants.
- [40:14]
Martin DeCaro
Here's Jonathan Schneer again. He says tension between Zionists and British officials eased after 1922. But in 1930, a Labor government wishing to assuage Arab resentment of the Jewish presence accepted a White Paper issued by Colonial Secretary Lord Passfield. You were just referring to this. He was a Fabian socialist, formerly known as Sidney Webb. Webb questioned the very bases of the Zionist program. Those were Jewish immigration into Palestine, exclusive labor practices, the wholesale purchase of Arab land. Against this paper, Zionists protested so vehemently that the government backed down. But in 1937, a Conservative government, hoping to settle the problem once and for all, accepted the recommendations of another investigative commission, this one led by Lord Peel. And that was Palestine should be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state. So, you know, Schneer says here that a result of this entire process, the lead up to the declaration, was fraught and tangled and had a lot of betrayals, real or perceived. And then the. The consequences of the Balfour Declaration also were troublesome. He said the result of all of it was the development of profound mistrust of all parties, by all parties, and growing from that mistrust, a bitterness that would lead to the spilling of much blood. And we can return to what one of the contributors to your petition said. Avi Schlaim. The current war in Gaza is the direct result of the Balfour Declaration. Is it that simple? Because there's a lot of time you.
- [41:55]
Victor Kattan
Have to ask Avi that question. But I think, I mean, you can't understand the present without understanding the past. So if you want to talk about Gaza, for example, why is Gaza the shape that it is? Who are Gazans? Yeah, Gazans. A lot of them. Most of them. Vast majority are people who are displaced from their homes in what was known as Palestine now that became Israel. And if you want to ask yourself, well, how was the State of Israel established, then you have to look at the Balfour Declaration. So yes, in a way, if, if you were to do that, it's not a straight line. As you mentioned, the British government had U turns. They had second thoughts, but the general trajectory was consistent support for the Zionist project.
- [42:33]
Martin DeCaro
It's not like the Balfour Declaration is a legal document that's still in effect today. But that's irrelevant. Its consequences are still apparent and rippling today because, as you say, the State of Israel comes about in 1948 in large part because of the Balfour Declaration. And here we can play a. A game, if you will, that's really impossible to answer. And that is, if there were no Balfour Declaration, would there have been a State of Israel in 1948?
- [42:59]
Victor Kattan
I don't think so, because the Balfour Declaration gave rise to the policy of creating the institutions of governance for a Jewish homeland. And I should also mention another thing we cover in the petition is the massive support that the British state gave to the Zionist paramilitary forces known as the Haganah and others who were trained, specially trained by British experts in counter insurgency techniques to suppress the Arab rebellion. That's right, that included Herzog, by the way, the President Herzog visited. He actually visited Downing street, the Prime Minister, on the same day we presented the petition. And the irony is that Herzog's father was one of the founders of the Haganah and he had been trained, especially trained by British troops in counterinsurgency techniques. And that also explains why they were so successful in the fighting in 1948.
- [43:53]
Martin DeCaro
That's right. They were trained and fought alongside the British. Whereas the outcome of the Arab revolt in 1939 was that the Arab forces were left in disarray, they were shattered and their leaders were sent packing.
- [44:05]
Victor Kattan
Yeah, they were deported and they were brutal. People have called it rule by law as opposed to rule of law, but they were now, we now call them enhanced interrogation techniques. But they were doing waterboarding, caging, other nastier forms of torture, summary executions, trials in police stations. They basically dispensed with any notion of a rule of law during their entire administration, especially during the emergency years. And the Arabs, it was a Palestinian community, the Arab community that bore the brunt of these measures.
- [44:35]
Martin DeCaro
Final thing here, Victor. You mentioned before that Zionist immigration wasn't simply immigration, it was a colonial project. And these terms in the current discourse are fraught, to use that word again, Some people chafe at the notion that the Jews of Israel today are running a colonial project or they were colonizers at some point in history. Can you address the use of the term colonialism in the current context?
- [45:02]
Victor Kattan
Most people associate colonialism as, say, European colonial power, say, colonizes America or Australia or whatever, and then settles its population there. And the argument here is that, well, the Jewish people didn't colonize Palestine and settle. It was the British that colonized Palestine and encouraged Jewish. So it is slightly different to those other examples, but it's still colonization because they are encouraging the mass migration of peoples of Jewish origin to a country with the view to establishing a nation state, a homeland. I was thinking of it like it's different, like when you have indentured laborers. For example, the Brits were famous for moving people of different religions and ethnicities around the world. Where on sugar fields in the West Indies or the tin plantations in Malaya or what have you in South Africa. They also had mass migration From Bengal and other places. That was for pure economic reasons. That wasn't the case of the Zionist, but they were. They were supporting the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine to eventually establish, whatever you want to call it, a Jewish national home, which was the language of the Balfour Declaration, a commonwealth or a state. And so it's that state project. And when you look at Herzl's original blueprint, his model was the big commercial Enter the East India Company, for example, was one of his models. This idea of using private capital to colonize the territory, even the institutions that they had established, like the Jewish Colonial Trust, the Jewish Colonial bank, use the word colonial. So, yes, it's slightly different, but it's still colonialism. And. And if you want to talk about today, Netanyahu. Well, the revisionist. Right. In fact, all the Israeli governments are doing in the west bank is colonization because they're doing it with a view to expanding their sovereign borders.
- [46:50]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, it's annexation de facto, if not de jure. And yes, Benjamin Netanyahu just said there will not be a Palestinian state. Fundamentally, on the topic of origins, the issue today was the issue back then, whose land does this belong to? And can two peoples coexist on this tiny sliver of land in the Middle east that means so much to both nations?
- [47:15]
Victor Kattan
Absolutely.
- [47:16]
Narrator (British Pathe Newsreel)
It is the land of Israel. Beyond the blue waters of the Mediterranean lies the low coastline to which millions of Jews all over the world are turning as their dream of hope. As Germany and other nations increase their persecution, treat them as carriers and outcasts, beat them down and trample on them, the Jews are turning more and more to their promised land, the land which they were told once would be flowing with milk and honey.
- [47:42]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History as it Happens, political violence in America. Some Americans say this is similar to what happened in Weimar Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. Is there anything to that comparison or is it more overheated rhetoric? We'll speak to David Abraham next as we report history as it happens. Become a subscriber, go to historyasithappens.com what.
- [48:10]
Narrator / Reporter
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Martin DeCaro
I'm seeing a pattern here.
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AMPM Advertiser
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Martin DeCaro
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