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How Balfour Explains The Failed Peace Process

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U.N. PHOTO

Jonathan S.
Tobin

to focus on Balfour wasn’t a joke.
Ten decades after British Foreign
Secretary Arthur Balfour publicly
expressed his government’s “sympa-
thy with Jewish Zionist aspirations”
and its support for “the establish-
ment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people,” the
Palestinian Arabs are still unrecon-
ciled to the fact that this goal was
realized with the establishment of
the State of Israel in 1948.
To Abbas and his Fatah party as
well as their Hamas rivals, Balfour
is the original sin of the Middle
East that explains all the suffering
of their people in the last century.
More than that, it is, as Jager — a
former Jerusalem Post editor and
author — writes, the key to under-
standing why negotiations between
Israel and the P.A. have remained at
a stalemate in the more than two
decades since the Oslo Accords.
“The 1993 Oslo Accords notwith-
standing, the PLO covenant — with
its denunciation of the
Balfour Declaration — has
never been legally amended,
and for good reason. The
problem Palestinian Arabs
have with Israel is its exis-
tence — not ‘settlements,’
‘occupied’ territory or the
security barrier,” Jager
writes.
“Abbas has consistently
made the point that the
Palestinians won’t recognize
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas or accept Israel as a Jewish
addresses the United Nations General Assembly. state. That would acknowl-

t was a minor news story
when it broke in the summer
of 2016. Palestinian Authority
(P.A.) President Mahmoud
Abbas announced he was suing
Great Britain over the Balfour
Declaration, issued on Nov. 2, 1917.
But as we observed the centen-
nial of the document last week,
it’s important to understand that
although his lawsuit was a stunt,
Abbas was serious.
More than that, the symbolism
of his protest tells us more about
what is preventing peace between
Israel and the Palestinians than
any of the usual explanations
about settlements, borders, the
status of Jerusalem or criticisms
of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu.
As Elliot Jager, author of a new
and timely book on the topic, The
Balfour Declaration: 67 Words, 100
Years of Conflict (Gefen Publishing
House), has written, Abbas’ decision

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edge the legitimacy of a Jewish
national home and doing so would
basically end the conflict.”
That means the conflict remains,
as Jager notes, an “all or nothing
(zero sum) clash.”
Jager’s addition to the list of vol-
umes on the declaration’s origin
provides an easy-to-understand
guide for general readers. The
British decision was based, in part,
on genuine sympathy for the aspira-
tions of a homeless people whose
ties to the land was part of the Bible
that the English loved as well as
Zionist diplomacy. But it was also
the product of a mistaken belief —
fueled by anti-Semitic myths — that
the Jews had the power to aid the
Allied war effort at a moment when
the outcome of World War I was in
doubt.
In truth, the Jews had no such
power. It was Balfour that allowed
them back onto the stage of world
history and, following the Allied
victory that brought Palestine
under British control, gave them
the opportunity to begin building a
state in their ancient homeland and
rectify the injustices of the past two
millennia.
Yet it is not so much the events of
1917 as what followed that we need
to understand.
Subsequent British governments
not only whittled down the size
of the Jewish homeland, but also
betrayed their promise by limit-
ing the rights of the Jews in order
to appease the Arab and Muslim

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world. That led to a series of pro-
posals for further dividing the land,
but the Arabs refused every such
offer, including the United Nations
partition plan of 1947 that called for
the creation of both a Jewish and an
Arab state. Sharing even part of the
country was unthinkable.
To the Arabs, the return of the
Jews was an injustice because it
would mean that even a tiny sliver of
the region they considered Muslim
might be under the sovereignty of a
dhimmi — a despised minority. That
same spirit is why the Palestinians
are still unreconciled to the con-
sequences of Balfour’s promise. As
Jager writes, “continued Arab rejec-
tion of the Balfour Declaration 100
years on makes any compromise
leading to a genuine conflict resolu-
tion impossible.”
Just as the Palestinians remain
in denial about the impossibility of
their dream of eventually eradicat-
ing Israel, it is just as important
that they come to terms with the
Jews’ 1917 diplomatic triumph and
understand why the Jews also have
a right to be there. Until that hap-
pens, the Palestinians will remain
doomed to live in a limbo in which
they can neither reverse the ver-
dict of history nor find a way to
live in peace alongside those who
benefited from Balfour’s historic
promise. •

Jonathan S. Tobin is opinion editor of JNS.org
and a contributing writer for National Review.
Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.

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