As a 'recognition' of the centennial of the issuing of the Balfour Declaration (November 2nd, 1917) the notoriously anti-Israel UK Guardian decided to give Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas an op-ed entitled "Britain must atone for the Balfour declaration – and 100 years of suffering" (no link,but you can find it if you like). It contains a number of outright lies. And while Abbas, a Soviet trained apparatchnik and agent is pretty good at manufacturing this propaganda, someone from the Guardian obviously helped him concoct this, based on the language, much of it drawn verbatim drawn from past anti-Israel screeds from, of course, The Guardian.
As ludicrous as the thing is, Mahmoud Abbas's lies rates a serious debunking.Walk with me awhile in the Valley of Truth...
For starters, the op-ed refers to Abbas as the 'President of Palestine'. That's a hilarious title, considering that he's an unelected dictator now serving in year 12 of what was supposed to be a 4 year term! But let's continue...
Lord Balfour as having 'signed a letter promising the land of Palestine to the Zionist Federation, a recently established political movement whose goal was the creation of a Jewish state. He promised a land that was not his to promise, disregarding the political rights of those who already lived there.'
What the Balfour declaration actually said was that Britain was in favor of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. And contrary to Abbas's nonsense, it specifically mentioned safeguarding the civil and religious rights of non-Jews living there, and of Jews living in other countries. Not only that, but the Balfour declaration meant nothing by itself. It was the League of Nations that created a Palestine Mandate under British control that was designated specifically to create a state that gave rights of sovereign specifically to Jews. And as we'll see, Britain bent over backwards when it came to Arab political rights.
It's also worth mentioning that Lord Balfour didn't create this on his own. It was the British cabinet that signed off on this. And they did it to reward the Jews for their help in WWI. Without Chaim Weismann, a skilled chemist discovering a process to enable fixing nitrogen out of the air, British troops would almost certainly have run out of ammo and artillery shells on the Western Front because of the success of German U-Boat attacks. Jews living in Palestine aided General Allenby's conquest of the Levant considerably with espionage and sabotage against the Ottomans at considerable personal risk, and an entire unit of British Jews fought alongside the Anzacs at the debacle in Gallipolli, something Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull pointed out in his visit to Jerusalem last week.
While most of the Arabs fought for their Ottoman masters, the few who didn't as part of the desultory Arab Revolt by the Sharif of Mecca received almost the entire Arabian Peninsula and ultimately 78% of the Palestine Mandate as their reward for taking a weak garrison in Aqaba well behind the fighting lines and sabotaging Turkish railways. Certainly the League of Nations rewarding the Jews with rights of sovereignty in their ancient homeland where a number of them already lived should have been no problem, since the land in the Palestine Mandate didn't belong to the Arabs either. It belonged to the Ottomans, who ceded it to the Allies under the Treaty of Sevres. So 'Palestine' like the rest of the ceded Ottoman lands belonged to the victorious allies, to do whatever they wished with it.
'British policy, to support Jewish immigration into Palestine while negating the Arab-Palestinian rights created severe tensions between European Jewish immigrants and the native Palestinian population.'
Oh boy.
Chaim Weismann, representing the Zionist movement and Emir Faisal, the third son of the Sharif of Mecca met and made an agreement to accede to a Jewish State in part of the Palestine Mandate. Faisel and Hussein were more than willing, since the British promised as a sweetener to create an Arab state out of most of the Mandate for his second son, Abdullah and give his first son Ali what became Iraq. So on 23 March 1918, in Al Qibla, the daily newspaper of Mecca, Feisel urged the Arabs to to welcome the Jews as brethren and cooperate with them for the common welfare.
The British then went back to the League of Nations to negotiate borders for an Arab state in Palestine, thus fulfilling their agreement with Emir Feisal. In the 1923 San Remo Accords, an agreement the Arabs were happy to sign off on, the Arabs received 78% of the Palestine Mandate for a state governed by Abdullah. It was called Trans-Jordan, later Jordan. The border the Arabs agreed to accept was the Jordan River. And accordingly, British removed a number of Jewish families who had settled east of the Jordan River to the other side, although no Arabs were removed from the 22% promised to the Jews.
The proof of this is the fact that so many of the 'settlements' like Ariel and the Gush Etzion bloc were first built in the 1920's after San Remo, on land legally purchased from the local Arab Muktars.
The tension was caused by the Arabs, led by the British appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The British did little to stop it, and Arab violence became endemic.
The British also responded by repeatedly limiting or even cutting off Jewish migration entirely to what was supposed to be the Jewish part of the Mandate while allowing in unlimited Arab migration. The worst example of this was the White Paper of 1939, which cut off all Jewish migration and denied Jews desperate for a haven from the coming Holocaust a refuge.That was something the League of Nations planned to take up as a violation of the conditions of the Mandate, until WWII erupted and made the League irrelevant. The death toll of the Holocaust was vastly increased as a result.
'Palestine (the last item on the decolonisation agenda) led to our greatest catastrophe – in Arabic the Nakba.'
In 1948 Zionist militias forcibly expelled more than 800,000 men, women and children from their homeland, perpetrating horrific massacres and destroying hundreds of villages in the process. I was 13 years old at the time of our expulsion from Safad.
Let's compare this with what Abbas has said on other occasions, shall we?
The Wall Street Journal on June 5th, 2003 made reference to an article penned by Abbas (AKA Abu Mazen) in an article entitled “Abu Mazen Charges that the Arab States are the Cause of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" ( emphasis mine) :
"Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) wrote an article in March 1976 in Falastin al-Thawra, the official journal of the PLO in Beirut: ‘The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe.’”
But wait, there's more. Here's Mahmoud Abbas's own version of his family's 'expulsion' in 1948.
In an interview with Al-Palestinia TV in 2009, Abbas admitted that his family was not expelled or driven out, but rather left voluntarily out of fear that the Jews might take revenge for the slaughter of 20 Jews in the city during the Arab pogroms of 19 years earlier:
“I am among those who were born in the city of Tzfat (Safed). We were a family of means. I studied in elementary school, and then came the naqba [calamity, namely, the founding of the State of Israel – ed.]. At night, we left by foot from Tzfat, to the Jordan River, where we remained for a month. Then we went to Damascus, and then to our relatives in Jordan, and then we settled in Damascus.
“My father had money, and he spent his money systematically, and after a year, the money ran out and we began to work.
So embarrassing when one's lies are contradicted from one's own mouth isn't it...and Abbas and his family aren't the only ones who left voluntarily.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was allowed back into mandatory Palestine in spite of his work for Hitler and the Nazis during WWII is on record as actively encouraging Arabs to leave what became Israel so that the Arab armies could massacre the Jews. The idea was that afterwards, these Arabs could return home again and have the pick of the dead Jew's wealth, property and women. Al-Husseini was joined in that by that by other Arab media. Which is exactly why the Arabs who left took those house keys with them. And at this link, you'll find a number of quotations from the Arab press admitting it.
You see, the 'Nakba' Abbas is talking about was actually a failed attempt at genocide, only three years after Auschwitz was liberated. To Abbas (and apparently his morally delinquent pals at the Guardian) the fact that it failed is cause for mourning and sorrow.The Arabs knew that genocide was their goal. And so did the British, who armed, trained and in the case of Jordan officered that attempt. If the Brits need to atone for anything, it's not the Balfour Declaration but their collaboration in trapping desperate Jews in Europe seeking refuge in what was supposed to be their land on the eve of the Holocaust to appease the Arabs. And collaborating actively with the next attempt by the Arabs in 1948 to massacre the Jews of Israel.
Oh, and those numbers Abbas cites? According to the last British census in 1947, there were 700,000 or so Arabs in the part of Palestine west of the Jordan. The ones who lived in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem were never expelled by anyone, because the Jordanian Arab Legion illegally occupied those areas and ethnically cleansed every Jew living there. Only about 600,000 Arabs or less lived in what became Israel. This included Druse, Bedouin and Christians. We also know that 120,000 Arabs stayed in Israel and later became Israeli citizens with full rights. Now the last time I checked, that would mean that about 480,000 or so Arabs left Israewl when the Arabs attacked, not '800,000.'
I'm not suggesting that some of these Arabs weren't forcibly driven out by the exigencies of what was, after all, a war of survival. But th elarge number who stayed shows that there were obviously many instances where those Arabs who wanted to simply stayed put, and decided not too listen to what Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Arab countries were telling them to do.
Now, if you want to see real ethnic cleansing in action, all you need do is examine the behavior of the Arab world after 1948. Almost a million Jews were thrown out of Arab countries they had lived in for decades forcibly simply because they were Jews, after everything they owned was plundered. Israel took in most of them, and the property, bank accounts and businesses stolen from them in today's money is conservatively estimated at a trillion dollars U.S.
There's a bit more nonsense about 'occupation' that's too ridiculous to even need a rejoinder. (Fun Question...which country's territory is Israel supposedly 'occupying?' It can't be 'Palestine,' which doesn't exist as a country. Even the UN hasn't signed off on that one just yet. And it can't be Jordan, since Jordan relinquished all claim to Judea and Samaria as part of the peace deal with Israel.)
But one thing that bears looking at who's writing this and what he and the PLO have created. Here we have Soviet trained dictator who actively supports terrorism, pays convicted murderers out of donor aid based on how many Jews they've murdered, and holds them up as heroes and 'holy martyrs.'
Abbas is a Holocaust denier who's book on the matter,written when he was being trained by the Soviets in Moscow is required reading in the Palestinian schools and used as a standard text in what passes for Palestinian education.
And human rights? Here's what someone who formerly lived under Abbas and Fatah's rule had to say about them:
And speaking of human rights, do you notice that the regimes shown here attacking Israel have a little something in common in terms of their own human rights situation?
I could also mention that 'honor killings' still occur in Abbasistan with distressing regularity, that journalists dare not voice any criticism of the regime and that homosexuals are persecuted and even killed there. I could also get into how Abbas became a billionaire and why he and his Fatah cronies live so well while his people struggle, but I digress.
You see, there's no reason, really, to expect anything better from Abbas. Like his former boss Yasser Arafat, he is always going to lie, cheat, and steal. He's always going to foment violence and murder. It's what he was trained to do by the Soviets, it pays really well and at this point, his main objective is to keep the status quo going, since actual peace would get a lot of people thinking about why they need parasites like Abbas and Fatah any more. They might even start asking awkward questions about where all that donor aid money went and try to do something about it.
The really interesting question is why so many people seem interested in being his enablers and collaborators. Especially people who claim to care about human rights, democracy and justice.
Could it be, just maybe, that it's because helping a thug like Abbas and his friends is a fashionable and acceptable 'Anti-Zionist' cover up for the real agenda... attacking Israel, the only Jewish State?
Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose...the more things change...you know the rest I assume.
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