On November 2, 1917, Britain's Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote a letter that would set off a conflict still being fought more than 100 years later. 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. When Balfour wrote of his government's intent to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, 90% of the people living there were not Jewish.
Just 31 years later, most of them were gone. This is the story of the British promise that led to the destruction of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel. Let's start with the obvious question: Why were the British making promises about other people's countries?
Short answer? Empire is one hell of a drug. This was World War I, and the British were making lots of promises.
In addition to promising a Jewish homeland in Palestine, They promised Arab leaders independence if they rose up against Britain's enemy, the Ottoman Empire. The Arabs did. Hollywood even made a movie about it.
- Arabia's for the Arabs now. - That's what I've told them anyway. That's what they think.
That's why they're fighting. Oh, surely. A month after Balfour's letter, British troops took Palestine, ending 400 years of Ottoman rule.
The people who lived there were Arabs, mostly Muslims, but they were Christian and Jewish minorities too. There was also a tiny number of European Jews who in the late 1800s had started building small colonies there. At a time when many Jews were suffering horrific persecution in Europe, they felt Palestine could be an escape.
The idea of building up a Jewish presence in Palestine became known as Zionism, but it stayed a fringe movement among European Jews. Many of them felt they shouldn't have to leave their countries to avoid persecution. But Zionism, as a political movement, took a big step forward with an Austrian man called Theodor Herzl.
And this guy is a very important name in this story. In 1896, he published “Der Judenstaat” - or in English, “The Jewish State. ” In it, he said, the only way for Jews to avoid Europe's anti-Semitism was not just to leave, but to have their own country.
And Herzl didn't just write. The next year he organized a conference in Basel, Switzerland: The First Zionist Congress. The attendees agreed on a program which sought, among other things, to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine and promote Jewish settlement in Palestine.
From here on out, the Zionist movement became very active, setting up funds to promote Jewish immigration to Palestine, companies to buy land there, and recruiting representatives to advocate for their cause with different governments. A few days after the conference, Herzl wrote this in his diary. He was only off by one year.
Ok, so that is a lot of history, but it's important because the Zionist movement is a critical part of the story going forward. Especially after it found a friend in the British government where a lot of high ranking officials supported Zionism, sometimes for unexpected reasons. Prime Minister Lloyd George, for example, was a Christian zealot who believed gathering the Jewish people in Palestine would bring Jesus Christ back to earth.
Others, like Balfour, believed that getting the Jewish people out of Europe and into their own country would be a good thing. Herzl was pretty visionary when he wrote that the anti-Semitic nations will become our allies. Meanwhile, the Zionist assured Britain that their future country would be a reliable ally.
So, that's the back story of how European anti-Semitism, Zionism and British imperialism all led to the Balfour Declaration. This British promise to build a homeland for Jews in Palestine. Now we're going to look at how Britain did that.
World War I had been a conflict between rival empires and the winners set up the League of Nations to distribute the losing side's territories between them. They called it the Mandate System - putting territories once controlled by by the Ottoman and German empires under the, until they became independent. Hm.
Britain was given the mandate over Palestine, but the Palestinian people were never asked what they wanted or what independence would look like to them. Listen to what Balfour wrote to one of his colleagues. Instead, it was the Zionists who were consulted about what their vision for Palestine was.
And so the mandate ended up incorporating not just the Balfour Declaration, but several clauses requiring Britain to ensure the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine. British rule was very accommodating to the Zionist project. The Jewish community in Palestine grew with big waves of immigration.
They had their own schools and factories and even their own militia, the Haganah. And they were led by the Polish-born David Ben-Gurion, the leader of their representative body, the Jewish Agency. To the Palestinians, it was clear that Britain wasn't delivering them independence.
It was delivering their country to other people. In 1936, they went on strike. British forces tried to break the strike with arrests, torture, mass punishment and executions.
Leaders were exiled, weapons confiscated and houses blown up. Palestinian fighters attacked British and Jewish targets, while British and Haganah forces would carry out joint raids on Palestinian villages. Something had to change.
The British government sent a commission called the Peel Commission to figure it out, but their proposed solution was typical: Just draw another British line on the map. Divide the country, give this part to the Jews and this part to the Palestinians and make that part of Transjordan next door. Oh, and because the Palestinians were a majority in the country, 250,000 of them would have to be removed by force to make the Jewish state viable.
Remember, these were the proposals that were meant to calm things down. Spoiler: they didn't. Instead, the revolt continued until 1939, by which time about 10% of Palestine's adult male population had either been killed, injured, arrested or exiled.
The British government really needed a solution - so here comes another report. The commission is studying the 20 year old Jewish settlements in British-mandated Palestine. The 1939 White Paper created a conflict between the British and the Zionists for the first time, because it rejected partition and said the solution was for Palestine to gain independence within 10 years, with everyone living there sharing it together.
Crucially, it also imposed severe limits on Jewish land purchases and immigration. To the Zionists, this felt like a betrayal. In response, some set off bombs across the country, killing dozens of Palestinians.
But soon everyone was distracted by something much bigger. More than 60 million people were killed in World War II, including 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi death camps. Jewish survivors fled Europe with a large number of them trying to find safety in Palestine, despite the British limit on Jewish immigration.
This set off a more direct confrontation between the Zionists and the British, with Palestinians often targeted as well. The Zionists knew two things: The Zionists knew two things: Militarily, they were stronger than the Palestinians and Britain was exhausted by World War II, so it wouldn't have the stomach to keep fighting in Palestine. They were right.
In 1947, after 30 years of occupation, Britain announced it was quitting Palestine and asked the newly formed United Nations to clean up its mess. Alright, 1947 and 1948 are the most pivotal years in this story. So let's take a look at how things are lining up.
During British rule, Jews had gone from 10% to 30% of the population. and owned about 6% of the land. Under Ben-Gurion's leadership, the Jewish Agency was pretty much functioning as a government for the Jewish community, And the Zionist militias had tens of thousands of soldiers, modern weapons and officers who had already fought in World War II.
On the other side, the Palestinians hadn't been allowed to develop their own administration or military. But as they waited for the UN’s solution, they were still the majority all over the country. In November 1947, the UN - then only made up of a fraction of the world's countries - voted to partition Palestine.
This plan marks off 55% of the country for a Jewish state. But the UN never explained how it could be a Jewish state when half the people in its territory were Palestinian. To nobody’s surprise Palestinians - and in fact all Arabs - rejected the UN’s plan.
Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership accepted, but they saw an opportunity. With the British on the way out, the Zionists knew they would have the strongest military in Palestine. Their forces were instructed to seize more territory than they'd been awarded by the UN and to do what was necessary to reduce the number of Palestinians in it.
In cities like Haifa, the militias set off car bombs in Palestinian neighborhoods. They attacked villages and forced residents out. - Haganah troops have driven the Arabs out of the beleaguered city, taking many prisoners.
After inspecting parts of western Jerusalem that have been emptied of Palestinians, Ben-Gurion said: One of the events that helped speed up these changes took place on April 9, 1948, when the village of Deir Yassin scene was attacked. A British government report to the United Nations describes the scene. 250 people were killed in circumstances of great savagery.
Women and children were stripped, lined up, photographed and then slaughtered by automatic firing. The story of what happened at Deir Yassin set off panic all over the country. As news spread, people fled, fearing they would be next.
Historians have recorded dozens of similar massacres during this period. Each time they would result in entire communities fleeing. By the time Britain ended its mandate on May 15th, 1948, 250,000 Palestinians had fled.
The night before David Ben-Gurion announced the founding of the State of Israel, with himself as its first prime minister. He was standing under a giant portrait of Herzl, 51 years after Herzl had predicted this very moment. The Zionist militias came together as the newly formed Israel Defense Forces, but the fighting wasn't over.
With the British out of the way, soldiers from several Arab countries entered Palestine, but the Israeli army was better equipped, better organized and, unlike the Arab armies, had a unified command and backing from several European countries. Israeli forces pushed into places that the UN had assigned to the Palestinian state, like the towns of Lydda and Ramleh. 50,000 people were forced to flee from there, many on foot, in what became known as the Lydda Death March.
After being emptied, the towns were given Hebrew names: Lod and Ramla. Like in many other empty towns, the buildings and homes were taken over by the new Israeli state and given to Jews. By the time the UN secured an armistice, three quarters of the Palestinian people had become refugees.
In Arabic, they call this the Nakba - literally, the catastrophe. The new state of Israel made up 78% of what had been Palestine. The remaining parts were annexed by Jordan or taken over by Egypt.
A year later, the UN passed a resolution calling for all Palestinian refugees to be allowed to return home. They never have been. Palestine had been erased.
In the decades since, attempts to resolve this conflict have again tried to partition the land. With each successive attempt, the territory offered to Palestinians in their historic homeland shrinks even more. Ironically, Israel is still struggling to maintain the population advantage it gained in 1948 when it forced all those people out because in 1967, it occupied the West Bank and Gaza, bringing all the Palestinians living there under its rule.
And so today, the population of Jews and non-Jews in this land is roughly equal. But those living under occupation have no rights, no citizenship and no prospect of independence. The Nakba era tactics of settlement, home demolitions and expulsion are still used against them.
Israel has taken the land but wants nothing to do with the millions under its rule. International, Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups say this system is a form of apartheid. To see if that's an accurate description of Israel more than 100 years after Balfour’s promise, watch this video here.
