This Day in History-the 02nd of November 1917-The Balfour Declaration-Part I

[أبو الحسنيين]

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IN THE NAME OF GOD THE COMPASSIONATE THE MERCIFUL

*THIS DAY IN HISTORY
*The 02nd of November 1917
*The Balfour declaration
*Elapsed Time: 91 years.

The Balfour Declaration:
Foreign Office
November 2nd, 1917
Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.
“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.”
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur James Balfour

Thus, declared and promised Arthur James Balfour the then British Foreign Secretary, in a letter to Lord Rothschild, president of the British Zionist Federation, in a clear historic combined plot between the British government and the Zionist movement at that time, the Declaration was accepted by the League of Nations on July 24, 1922 and embodied in the mandate that gave Great Britain temporary administrative control of Palestine.
It goes without saying that the British pledge which formally committed the British to the Zionist cause, was this Balfour Declaration of the second of November 1917, an instrument created after the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence and the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and long before the emergence of David Lloyd George as prime minister and Arthur James Balfour as foreign secretary in December 1916; the Liberal Herbert Asquith government had viewed a Jewish entity in Palestine as detrimental to British strategic aims in the Middle East.

Lloyd George and his Tory supporters, however, saw British control over Palestine as much more attractive than the proposed British-French condominium. Since the time of the Sykes-Picot agreement, Palestine had taken on increased strategic importance because of its proximity to the Suez Canal, where the British garrison had increased to 300,000 men, and because of a planned British attack on Ottoman Syria originating from Egypt. Lloyd George was determined, as early as March 1917, that Palestine should become British and that he would rely on its conquest by British troops to obtain the abrogation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
Going back to the historical background of the so called “Jewish national home” concept, we must recall that the Balfour Declaration was the direct outcome of a deep scrutiny effort by the Zionist Organization to establish a Jewish State in Palestine, none other was in front than the man known as Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement who wrote in Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896:

“The Idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: it is the “restoration” of the Jewish State, Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation, the rest we shall manage for ourselves”
[Laqueur, Walter, the Israel Arab Reader (New York, Bantam Books, 1976), pp. 6-11].
Herzl mentioned Palestine and Argentina but, the following year, the first Zionist Congress held in Basle, Switzerland in 1897 ,declared that the goal of Zionism was to “create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law”, Herzl wrote:

“Were I to sum up the Basle Congress in a word which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly, it would be this: at Basle I founded the Jewish State, If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter, perhaps in 5 years, and certainly in 50 everyone will know it.”[Herzl, Theodor, the Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, New York, Herzl press and Thomas Yosecoff, 1960, vol. I, p. 343]
And it was the founder of global Zionism movement Theodor Hertzel who had always referred to Palestine a land without nation and the nation of Palestine as a people without homeland. As part of this policy, the British gradually settled Zionists and turned a blind eye to the Jewish terror gangs that sprung up and routinely killed and massacred Palestinian people and destroyed their homes and farmlands. Massacres of Palestinians in Deir- Yassin, Kafar, Qibya and Qassem villages are among the most savage killings and a dark stain on the Zionist state of “ Israel.”
Following an outright rejection by the Ottoman authorities of his ideas, Hertzel approached the British, German, Belgian and Italian Governments and such remote locations as Cyprus, East Africa and the Congo were considered, but did not materialize. The creation of a Jewish State in Palestine became the avowed aim of Zionism, zealously pressed by Dr. Chaim Weizmann when he came to head the movement.
It was this Weizmann who played a vital role by inventing a fermentation process that allowed the British to manufacture their own liquid acetone, and therefore avoiding Great Britain the loss of war and it was this fermentation process that brought Weizmann to the attention of Lloyd George (minister of ammunitions) and Arthur James Balfour (Previously the British prime minister but at this time the first lord of the admiralty). Chaim Weizmann was not just a scientist; he was also the leader of the Zionist movement.
Zionist leaders stressed the strategic advantages to Britain of a Jewish State in Palestine. In a letter written in 1914 to a sympathizer, Weizmann said:

“Should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence, and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in 20 to 30 years a million Jews out there perhaps more; they would form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.”
[Weizmann, Chaim, Trial and Error (New York, Harper, 1949), p. 178].
Another Weizmann letter of 1916 reads:[/frame]