Balfour at Hundred

2017 marks the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration just as 2016 marked the hundredth anniversary of the Sykes-Picot agreement.  While the latter symbolized a clandestine agreement signed by the British and the French, specifying how the two powers would split the Ottoman Arab provinces after the First World War, the former constituted a public statement issued by then British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, assuring government backing for the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Together, they are regarded by many as being instrumental in shaping the history of the modern Middle East.

For one of the most prominent “new historians”, Avi Shlaim, “The Sykes-Picot agreement is the symbol of the European carve-up of the Middle East, in total disregard for the rights and aspirations of the local population,”  and “the Balfour Declaration is the symbol of European colonial imposition of a foreign entity in the heartland of the Arab world”. From this perspective, the Balfour declaration is viewed as the architect of the “process of dispossession, dispersal, and the exile of the Palestinians”, which concluded with the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. Britain’s brief tryst with Middle Eastern politics is perceived as having inflicted a catastrophic impediment for the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. At the same time the British role in the Middle East is seen as safeguarding the interests of its “junior ally” the Zionist state of Israel, often labelled as a variant of “settler-colonialism”.

The Middle Eastern policy of the British government from this standpoint can be summed up by way of three major agreements, the alleged promise made to Sharif Hussein of Mecca in 1915, wherein the British were believed to have reassured him that they would back the formation of an independent Arab kingdom under the Sharif’s rule, on the condition that he would initiate an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War; the Sykes-Picot agreement that never materialized and the Balfour declaration. The consolidated effect of the three rather inconsistent arrangements has been the consolidation of a reality (the state of Israel) but at the same time a negation of the existence of the other (Palestine).

From a critical perception as offered by the likes of Edward Said and IIan Pappe, the significance of the Balfour Declaration lies in the fact that it continues to constitute the legal and dialectical basis of the Zionist entitlement to Palestine; and even more explicitly, it was a proclamation whose geographical influence can only be grasped or realised when the demographic or social actualities of Palestine are clearly comprehended. It was a Declaration made by a European power regarding a non-European space in complete contempt of both the existence and the aspirations of the native residents of the territory who were incidentally the majority in terms of numbers as well and it acquired the nature of an assurance about this same region/space to a different foreign group, that they could, quite simply, convert this geographical space into a national home for themselves.

From the perspective of the critical school, the Balfour declaration permitted a “settler colonial movement’’ that emerged/evolved rather late in time, to visualize a dominant project even before it physically manifested itself in the land or had a consequential geographical and demographic existence there. The native population was sought to be eliminated and replaced by a population who were granted in the words of IIan Pappe, “demographic exclusivity and total geographical ownership” and as Edward Said remarked, it connoted the substitution of “absence with presence”.

Almost any and every milestone connected with the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict entails celebration for one group and lament for the other. The Balfour Declaration was a momentous step forward for the Zionists culminating in the establishment of the Jewish state while it simply but profoundly presaged a ‘Nakba’ (Catastrophe) for the Palestinians. However, as Ian Lustick contends that the declaration in itself does not epitomise a profound reasoning of “international law, western culture or historical rights”, nor does it exemplify the infernal rationality of “European imperialism” committed to manipulating the people and the resources of the region. The Declaration as such was a random and illogical corollary of the concurrences/coincidences of European affairs. Its content as Arthur Koestler commented, was entirely unintentional and farfetched wherein one nation sombrely reassured a second nation the country of another. The British term “home” in fact offered an undefined substitute for explicit references to statehood.

Without alluding to the Balfour Declaration, several alternatives that have been proposed by both Israeli and Palestinian academics in recent times quintessentially conjure the semantic of Balfour. These are often in the form of a confederation suggestive of an Israeli-Palestinian union in which two states occupy one space and share a common homeland aimed at granting economic freedom and endorsing historical justice for both Palestinians and Jews.  The movement is from “state” to “nation”. The former is viewed as an organizational structure from which multiple nations seek to explore inclusive openings for self-administration, cultural articulation and identification of national ethos.

In the contemporary perspective the Balfour Declaration can be viewed as a parameter for peace constructed on the proposition of “two national homes in one state and not on two states in one nation”. The message for 2017 is perhaps that whatever the solution be: one state for one peoples; two states for two peoples; two homes for two peoples within one state, the future of the nation/state shall be dependent not on debates but on the competition among various political spectrums with stability being equally reliant upon resources and public sentiments of both those who inhabit the land and those who don’t but for whom the future of the nation has deep or slight but nevertheless genuine, significance.

Priya

12/10/2017

References

Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine 1917-1949, London: Macmillan Co, 1949.

Avi Shlaim, “The Balfour Declaration: A study in British duplicity”, Middle East Eye.

Avi Shlaim, “Palestine, Britain and the Balfour Declaration 100 years on”, Middle East Monitor.

Edward W. Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims”, Social Text No. 1 Winter, 1979,

Ian Lustick, “The Balfour Declaration A Century Later: Accidentally Relevant”, Middle East Policy, Vol. XXIV, No.4, Winter 2017.

IIan Pappe, “Black November”, Al-Jazeera.