The Palestinians and British Perfidy: The Tragic Aftermath of the Balfour Declaration of 1917

Ottoman Turkey's decision to ally with Germany in the First World War led directly to the British (and French) conquest of the Middle East and sealed the fate of Palestine. In a monstrous betrayal of its people (93% of them Arab) the November 1917 Balfour Declaration withheld the independence they rightly anticipated and, for strategic reasons, earmarked Palestine as a National Home for the Jewish People. Ronald Storrs, a British Foreign and Colonial Office official, remarked that "The U.K. proposed to hand (Palestine), without consulting the occupants, to a third party; and what sort of third party!" The result was the foundation of Israel in 1948. Through ethnic cleansing and massacre, the new state drove out helpless Palestinian victims of Perfidious Albion, in whom London at no stage showed the slightest interest. They were condemned to seventy years in refugee camps or to second-class citizenship of Israel as, in the words of an Israeli Foreign Minister, the land-grab state was "born in sin." Credit for this shameful act is generally given to the Zionist supporters of Theodore Herzl. But Britain cleared the way by expelling the Mufti of Jerusalem, the Palestinians' only leader, providing the Zionists, who extraordinarily made concurrent overtures to Hitler and Mussolini, with military training in Britain's Second World War campaigns in Iraq and Syria. Itself ejected by its ungrateful protege, Britain lost all the aims of its Declaration (no base to guard the Suez Canal, no Haifa port, no railway to Iraq, and no oil pipeline) and all its prestige in the Arab World.