The Balfour Declaration: a century on
Part 2: The cancer of colonialism
Contrary to popular belief, British Jews actually opposed the formation of a Zionist state in Palestine.
Sir Edwin Montagu, a British Jew in the Cabinet, sent a memo to his cabinet colleagues, explaining how ‘Judaism was a religion not a nation’ and that a Jewish state in Palestine would undermine equal rights for diaspora Jews. The British government chose conveniently to ignore such contentions.
As much as Britain plays the humanitarian card today, in that Jews persecuted by Nazi Germany deserved a homeland – even though Nazi persecution actually began after the Balfour declaration – the reality of their motives speaks quite the opposite.
In fact, Balfour himself helped pass the Aliens Act of 1905, which helped keep Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Russia and Europe, out of Britain.
Evidently so, the Balfour declaration was nothing to do with helping the Jewish people, rather everything to do with national interests.
Just how today, those interests take the guise of ‘protecting the world from extremism’, and result in bombing Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan to the ground.
Deep-rooted discrimination and subjugation
Britain’s Cabinet of 1917 contained Zionists and racists alike. The then Minister for War, Winston Churchill, dismissed the idea that zionists were colonial settlers, saying: “I do not admit that the dog [Palestine] in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, ‘The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here’. They had not the right, nor had they the power.” (Churchill giving evidence before the Palestine Royal Commission known as The Peel Commission, 1937).
This air of arrogance displayed by the British establishment in assuming the right to control which set of people have the right to which land, is a result of its racism, discrimination and subjugation – practised to oppress those it feels threatened by.
Today, this very subjugation is disguised through the ‘War on Terror’, the Prevent programme and the west’s opposition to the Muslim world deciding its own system of ruling.
British-orchestrated brutality
It was colonialist policy – via the League of Nations’ settlements – that transformed a land (Palestine) which prospered for over 10 centuries under the Khilafah, to one under British mandate.
Leading to Britain being responsible for decades of death, displacement and destruction in the region through giving birth to the Zionist entity.
Wherever Britain has gone, its colonial trail has left nothing but death and misery, be that:
Their role in the Aboriginal atrocities such as the genocide that wiped out the Tasmanian
Aborigines, inspiring assimilation policies and overseeing the removal of mixed-race children with a view to make “full-blood Aborigines” die out – all aiding the consequent wipeout of an entire race off the face of the Earth.
The horrific Boer concentration camps in South Africa – where almost 10% of the entire Boer population was killed within one year alone.
The numerous famines in India, such as the Bengal Famine, caused by large-scale exports of food from India for use in the war theatres and consumption in Britain. India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice between January and July 1943, even as the famine set in – this famine alone took the lives of some 3 million Indians.
The list of Britain’s bloody colonial legacy goes on much further. The systematic confinement of 1.5 million Kenyans in concentration camps, outright obliteration of Afghanistan and Iraq, the active complicity in today’s disastrous Yemen crisis, and more…
