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Shimon Peres Versus the Brits

(Jerusalem Post) Efraim Karsh - Last week Israeli President Shimon Peres provoked anger among British politicians and Anglo-Jewish leaders when he told a Jewish website that the British establishment had always been "deeply pro-Arab...and anti-Israel," and that this was partly due to endemic anti-Semitic dispositions. While observers responded that Britain had been the midwife of the Jewish state, the truth is that no sooner had Britain been appointed as the mandatory power in Palestine, with the explicit task of facilitating the establishment of a Jewish national home in the country in accordance with the Balfour Declaration, than it reneged on this obligation. In 1921, the British government severed the vast and sparsely populated territory east of the Jordan River ("Transjordan") from the prospective Jewish national home and made Abdullah, the emir of Mecca, its effective ruler. In 1922 and 1930, two British White Papers limited Jewish immigration to Palestine and imposed harsh restrictions on land sales to Jews. Britain's betrayal of its international obligations to the Jewish national cause reached its peak on May 17, 1939, when a new White Paper, issued just prior to the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, imposed draconian restrictions on land sales to Jews and limited immigration to 75,000 over the next five years. In the postwar years, tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors who sought to run the British naval blockade were herded into congested camps in Cyprus, where they were incarcerated for years. Prime Minister Clement Attlee compared Holocaust survivors wishing to leave Europe and to return to their ancestral homeland to Nazi troops invading the continent, while the last high commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, said of Zionism, "The forces of nationalism are accompanied by the psychology of the Jew, which it is important to recognize as something quite abnormal and unresponsive to rational treatment." The writer is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London.
2010-08-06 09:21:23
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