Two Unfortunate Accidents of Geography

by Jason Collett

27 June 2003

The Iraqi people's misfortune, as someone recently put it, is geographical – they have unintentionally been living on soil located precisely above American oil. Many Iraqi people, men, women and children, have had to be killed by the Americans and their British subordinates - using weapons of mass destruction in a shocking and awful illegal invasion – in order for them to be set free. [Free of their oil?] 

The Palestinian tragedy is that the Palestinian people have continuously lived for some millenia on property that the international Jewish community decided about a century ago should become their own 'national home', on the basis of a delusion that their extremely distant ancestors had lived there. [The Jewish writers Arthur Koestler (in The Thirteenth Tribe, 1976) and Dr Alfred Lilienthal (in The Zionist Connection, 1978, pp 731-733) agreed with H.G.Wells. In the early 1920's in his popular Outline of History he described the Jews as 'a Turkish people' and stated that '(to the) Jewish Khazars.. are to be ascribed the great settlements of Jews in Poland and Russia' (chapt XXXII:8) and 'The main part of Jewry never was in Judea, and never came out of Judea' (XXIX:1).] This idea of taking over someone else's country, Palestine, and (inaccurately) calling it Israel, has been based on the very dubious legal principle that any real estate occupied at some stage very long ago for a period by any people actually remains theirs in perpetuity (with the proviso, of course, that they are Jews). 

The entire territory of what is today Israel and Palestine was Palestinian until 1947. Perhaps it is necessary to repeat: The entire territory of what is today Israel and Palestine was Palestinian until 1947. Back in 1917, the Jewish population of the area was a mere 7% of the 700 000 inhabitants. Nevertheless the British government was 'persuaded' to issue the 'Balfour Declaration', named after the British Foreign Secretary who made the following statement in a letter (significantly enough) to Baron de Rothschild, dated November 2 1917:

"Dear Lord Rothschild, 
I have pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which have been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet: 'His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing will be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.' I shall be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation. Yours sincerely, Arthur James Balfour." 

The sentence in bold is particularly interesting in view of what has happened since then, aside from the fact that 'the Arabs simply said that western civilization has no right to impose the solution of the Jewish problem - a problem created by itself - on the Arab world' (Richard Crossman M.P. Palestine Mission (1947) p119). 

The other 93% of the population were Arabs. In 1947 the United Nations under tremendous US pressure gave the Zionist Jews, who by then owned only about 6% of the land, 56% of the territory of Palestine. 

Poor, poor Palestine. You have not yet been finally and violently entirely removed from the last broken and charred remains of your own territory by the most liberal international constituency in the entire world. 

But, the pressure is building up...