Part VIII
A considerable amount of hostility that resulted with the increase of Jewish immigration to Palestine did not begin when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917, as has been noted. Yet there were brief moments when some Arab support existed for Zionist aspirations before political realities emerged.
Matthias Küntzel, a German political scientist and historian, said he found there were significant representatives of the Arab world who backed the Zionists in their efforts to return to their ancestral homeland.
They hoped that Jewish immigration would increase economic growth in the region, bringing them closer to European standards. Ziwar Pasha, for example, who later became Egyptian prime minister, personally participated in festivities of the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
Abd Al-Fattah Muhammad El-Awaisi, a professor of international relations, said that five years later, Ahmed Zaki, a former Egyptian cabinet minister, praised Dr. David Eder, the Zionist Executive in Palestine, for the advances the Zionists had made in realizing their goals: “The victory of the Zionist idea is the turning point for the fulfilment of an ideal which is so dear to me, the revival of the Orient.” He believed the objective of Zionism was “to carry the torch which should illuminate the Orient.”
Two years after that, Lieutenant-Colonel F. H. Kisch, chairman of the Jerusalem Zionist Executive, went to Cairo to meet with three high-ranking Egyptian officials to discuss future relations, Küntzel said. In his diary, Kisch remarked how they “were equally emphatic in their pro-Zionist declarations.” They recognized that “the progress of Zionism might help to secure the development of a new Eastern civilization.”
In 1925, while on his way to participate in the inauguration of the Hebrew University, Egyptian Interior Minister Ismail Sidqi “took action” against a group of Palestinian Arabs protesting against the Balfour Declaration in Cairo.
‘The Incubator of Terror’
Between 1925 and 1945 a reversal of attitude toward Israel occurred in Egypt, asserts Küntzel. From a position of neutrality, it changed to openly virulent hostility to Zionism. This shift, which transformed the Arab world, continues to influence how Israel is perceived and how many in the world relate to the Jewish State.
The impetus for this change was the Society of Muslim Brothers (the Muslim Brotherhood), established in Ismailia, Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna. The Muslim Brotherhood reflects the revival of Islam as the primary basis of individual and collective identity in the Middle East. The importance of the Brotherhood “to Islamism is comparable to that of the Bolshevik Party to communism: It was and remains to this day the ideological reference point and organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda and Hamas,” explains Küntzel.
The Brotherhood believes that Britain used the Balfour Declaration “to facilitate the transfer of a considerable amount of Arab land to the Jews, and that British policy aimed at uprooting one people and replacing it with another,” This is because of Britain’s “inherent hatred of Islam and Islamic civilization,” according to El-Awaisi.
Article 22 of the Hamas (Palestinian Arab branch Brotherhood) Charter claims Jews “were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration and formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world.”
Article 20 of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)’s Palestinian National Charter: Resolutions of the Palestine National Council July 1-17, 1968, states: “The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.”
“The world’s incubator of modern Islamic terrorism,” and “the world’s most dangerous militant cult,” is how Cynthia Farahat describes the Muslim Brotherhood in her book “The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death.”
Farahat, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, says the Brotherhood’s goal is “to destroy the West’s ‘miserable house’ by infiltrating Western society and institutions and subverting them from the inside.”
“The Western mind,” she says, “often struggles to comprehend the altruistic suicidal patience of an Islamist whose most prized goal is to die as a martyr.” This objective is not just motivated by the Islamist’s “lust for reward in the afterlife and to terrorize their enemies; it is also a political, social and religious duty to help recruit others and inspire allegiance to their vision of a Islamic state. Every major political action taken by an Islamist is designed to serve long-term goals.”
Marking the Anniversary of The Balfour Declaration
The Jerusalem Post reported that Palestinian Arabs solicited the Arab League’s assistance in preparing a legal brief against the British government for issuing the Declaration at its 100-year anniversary.
A number of Israeli leaders ridiculed the proposed lawsuit. Avi Dichter, then the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman, wondered, “If PA President Abu Mazen can sue Great Britain on the Balfour Declaration from 99 years ago, then who is next in line, the Egyptian Pharaoh? Perhaps the charge could read: ‘You sent the Jews out of Egypt 3,500 years [ago] and since then there has been only trouble in the land of Israel.’”
Gilad Erdan, then Public Security Minister, dismissively advised the Palestinian Arabs to consider suing God for promising Abraham in the book of Bereishit, that he would give the Land of Israel to his descendants.
When marking the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the Palestinian Authority (PA) emphasizes that Israel has no right to exist, according to Palestinian Media Watch.
The PA portrays the establishment of Israel as “theft” and the Balfour Declaration as “the ominous promise,: through which “one who has no ownership,” i.e., Britain, “gave a promise to one who has no right,” i.e., the Jews.
Although this message is taught to Palestinian Arab schoolchildren throughout the year, the PA Ministry of Education makes a special effort to highlight this point on November 2. During a school event commemorating “the ominous promise,” young school children held signs and Palestinian flags. One sign read “Satan’s promise.”
Faisal-Weizmann Agreement
On January 3, 1919, Emir Faisal, leader of the Arab delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, who later became king of Iraq, and Chaim Weizmann signed a diplomatic document in an attempt to resolve issues affecting Arab and Jewish relations.
Julius Stone, one of the foremost authorities on international law, explains this document, known as the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement, which stated: “… mindful of the racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people, and realizing that the surest means of working out the consummation of their natural aspirations is through the closest possible collaboration in the development of the Arab State and Palestine, and being desirous further of confirming the good understanding which exists between them, have agreed to the following articles:
“Article I of the agreement stipulates an exchange of ‘Arab and Jewish duly accredited agents’ between the ‘the Arab State’ and ‘Palestine,’ implying Jewish sovereignty over Palestine.
“Article IV states: ‘All necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale, and as quickly as possible to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land through closer settlement and intensive cultivation of the soil.’”
Stone adds that in a letter to Felix Frankfurter, then a Zionist delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, on March 3, 1919, Faisal wanted to “wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.” He acknowledged the simultaneous development of Jewish and Arab liberation movements and that “having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves,” he would take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.”
He thanked Weizmann for having been “a great helper of our [Arab] cause,” and hoped “the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness.” Glaringly omitting any talk of Palestinian nationhood, Faisal declared, “We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed, I think that neither can be a real success without the other.”
When Emir Abdullah of Trans-Jordan traveled from Jenin to Lydda, Simon H. Rifkind, a district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, a trial lawyer, points out he “was astonished at what [he] saw at the Jewish colonies … They have colonized the sand dunes, extracted their water, quickened them to life and transformed them into a paradise.”
Ironically, Arabs at the time bristled at the name “Palestine,” notes Bernard Lewis, one of the world’s leading experts on Islam, since they considered it an integral part of Greater Syria. People in the region viewed the divisions made by the French in Syria-Lebanon and by the British in Palestine as completely artificial.
This period was short-lived. As pan-Arabism spread throughout the Arab world, Lewis said, the Palestinians asserted themselves as Arabs, and not as Syrians from the south. During the British Mandate and for many years later, they and their organizations expressed their national identity as Arabs and not as Syrians or Palestinians.
Dr. Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
