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Turks, Arabs Welcomed the Balfour Declaration

(Middle East Quarterly) Efraim Karsh - The Israeli-Palestinian conflict evolved in spite of the Balfour Declaration, not because of it. The Balfour Declaration was quickly endorsed by the contemporary international community, including the leaders of the nascent pan-Arab movement. Moreover, it was not the Balfour Declaration that paved the road to the displacement of many Palestinians but its rejection by the extremist Palestinian Arab leadership headed by the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin Husseini - this against the wishes of ordinary Palestinian Arabs who preferred to coexist with their Jewish neighbors and take advantage of opportunities created by the evolving Jewish national enterprise. Had this leadership not ignored the wishes of its subjects, and the will of the international community, there would have been no nakba. On August 12, 1918, Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha, one of the triumvirs who had run the Ottoman Empire - head of the world's Muslim community - since 1913, issued an official communique expressing "sympathies for the establishment of a religious and national Jewish center in Palestine by well-organized immigration and colonization" and offering to promote this enterprise "by all means" provided it "does not affect the rights of the non-Jewish population." The leaders of the nascent pan-Arab movement were perfectly amenable to endorsing the Balfour Declaration so long as this seemed to be conducive to their ambitions. And none more so than the Hashemite emirs Faisal and Abdullah who, together with their father, the Sharif of Mecca Hussein ibn Ali, perpetrated the "Great Arab War" against the Ottoman Empire. They were generously rewarded for their endeavors in the form of vast territories several times the size of the British Isles. On June 4, 1918, Faisal met Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist movement. The two struck up an immediate rapport, and the emir readily acknowledged "the necessity for cooperation between Jews and Arabs" and "the possibility of Jewish claims to territory in Palestine." At a dinner held on his behalf by Lord Rothschild, to whom Balfour sent the letter containing his famous declaration, Faisal reiterated, "No true Arab can be suspicious or afraid of Jewish nationalism, and what better intermediary could we find anywhere in the world more suitable than you? For you have all the knowledge of Europe, and are our cousins by blood." On Jan. 3, 1919, Faisal signed an agreement with Weizmann supporting the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine in accordance with the Balfour Declaration and pledging the adoption of all necessary measures "to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale." The writer, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is emeritus professor of Middle East studies at King's College London and professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University, where he directs the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
2017-11-06 00:00:00
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