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Brits behind mistrust in Mideast, author says

Reviewed by: Graeme Voyer

Posted: 08/14/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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Schneer argues that Britain's actions long ago are behind much of the Middle East conflict.

The Balfour Declaration

The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

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By Jonathan Schneer

Random House, 464 pages, $40

The Balfour Declaration is typically seen as a landmark in Jewish history.

Issued during the First World War in November 1917, and named after the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, the declaration pledged the British government to support the establishment in Palestine of a homeland for the Jewish people.

However, in this convincingly argued revisionist narrative, American historian Jonathan Schneer shows that the "landmark" of the Balfour Declaration almost did not come to pass, and could very easily have been just another exercise in wartime rhetoric.

Every 25 years or so, there is a new history of the Balfour Declaration. The classic account seems to be Leonard Stein's The Balfour Declaration (1961).

In 1984, Ronald Sanders published The High Walls of Jerusalem: A History of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine.

And in 2009 appeared Balfour and Weizmann: The Zionist, the Zealot and the Emergence of Israel by Geoffrey Lewis.

Schneer, who has written five previous books, does not mention his predecessors, though he lists them in his bibliography. He maintains that his interpretation is distinctive -- that the achievement of the Balfour Declaration was not a straightforward, triumphal progress, but rather the result of a process that was highly contingent.

Schneer depicts the high politics of the time. The Declaration, and British policy in the Middle East in general, must be understood in the context of the First World War, which pitted Britain and its allies France and Russia against Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey.

The Turks ruled much of the Middle East through their Ottoman Empire. The British encouraged an Arab nationalist movement to revolt against its Ottoman rulers. This movement envisioned an Arab kingdom in the Middle East, including Syria and Palestine.

At the same time that the British were fostering Arab aspirations, British politicians and officials were courting Zionists. Zionism was a movement embraced by some Jews seeking a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The British hoped to rally Jewish opinion to support the war effort; accordingly they offered the Zionists territory in Palestine, territory that the Arabs expected would be theirs.

But Britain did not only have to balance the conflicting claims of Jews and Arabs. It also had to consider its wartime ally France, which had interests in the Middle East. In particular, France sought to control Syria, which, the French held, included northern parts of Palestine.

As if this situation was not convoluted enough, some British policy makers, including the prime minister, David Lloyd George, were secretly pursuing a separate peace with Turkey. And as the price of Turkey's withdrawal from the war, Lloyd George was prepared to allow the Turkish flag to continue to fly over Palestine.

Ultimately, Lloyd George's overtures to the Turks came to naught. As Schneer says, if the Zionists and Arabs had known about Lloyd George's approach to the Turks, they would have considered it a gross betrayal.

Thus, Schneer shows, British policy in the Middle East during the First World War was characterized by duplicity.

This duplicity created an atmosphere of mistrust that had a deleterious impact on the subsequent history of the region.

Another theme of Schneer's analysis is the internecine conflict within the Jewish community between Zionists, who believed that Jews could be truly at home only in Palestine, and assimilationists, who argued that Jews could adapt to the various societies in which they lived.

Schneer has elaborated the complex interplay of forces -- Arab nationalism, Zionism, British and French imperialism and the exigencies of the First World War -- that issued in the Balfour Declaration. It is a monumental work of diplomatic history that illuminates the sources of conflict in the Middle East.

Graeme Voyer is a Winnipeg writer.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 14, 2010 H7

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