My Rather Civilized Conversation with Larry Derfner About Iran

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Balfour & Weizmann Remembered

In November the Arabs Said 'No'


There are no uneventful months in the tortured history of the Arab-Israel conflict. November is no exception. It was on November 2, 1917 that Chaim Weizmann won the backing of the British government for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" famously codified by Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930) in his letter to Lord Rothschild, titular head of the British Jewish community, as the Balfour Declaration. And as if to bookend the month, November 29th will mark the 64th anniversary of the UN General Assembly's adoption of the 1947 Partition Plan: the two-state solution that was recklessly spurned by the Arabs; a rebuff that has embodied Arab rejection of a Jewish homeland ever since.

On November 9th the Israel Britain and Commonwealth Association held a gala anniversary dinner in Tel Aviv to mark Balfour's pronouncement. Guests included Britain's ambassador to Israel, the EU head of delegation and ambassadors from several commonwealth countries (including those who reflexively vote against Jerusalem at the U.N.). The Israeli government does not make too much of the occasion though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made passing reference to the Balfour Declaration in his September 2011 remarks to the UN General Assembly and Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon did address the Tel Aviv banquet.

For its part, Hamas makes it a point to issue an annual denunciation of the declaration accompanied this year by a blood-curdling montage. Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the official daily newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, routinely condemns Balfour claiming his declaration granted rights to "those who had no connection" to the land – meaning the Jewish people.

Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), then a distinguished chemist living in London, was instrumental in fashioning the Zionist-British alliance that resulted in the declaration. Fittingly, it was in November 60 years ago that Weizmann was re-elected to the presidency of Israel despite failing health. In fact, both Weizmann's 59th yahrzeit and the 137th anniversary of his birth are also commemorated this month.

Weizmann's achievement was never preordained, as Jonathan Schneer, by no means a Zionist sympathizer, notes in his The Balfour Declaration. The early Zionist leader had to overcome influential assimilationists Jews, including Edwin Montagu, who strenuously lobbied their government against cooperating with the Zionists, as well as Grand Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons the emirs Abdullah and Feisal who lobbied through British proxies. (The family ultimately lost control of Arabia to the Saudis.)

While the Palestinian Arabs had scarcely any unique identity at the time, Arab intellectuals in Syria pressured against Zionism on the grounds that Palestine was an integral part of Syria and could therefore not be delinked from Britain's magnanimous territorial bequest to the Arabs.

At the end of the day Britain, the preeminent power during and in the aftermath of World War One (1914–1918), promised the Jews a sliver of the Middle East, while the Arabs would get everything else. Even these commitments to the Jews and Arabs would have come to naught had secret talks conducted between Britain and the Ottoman Empire led to a separate peace, according to Schneer.

After World War I, both the Paris Peace Conference (1919) and the San Remo Conference (1920) ratified Britain's mandate for Palestine. France's presence in Syria notwithstanding, Britain's role assured that both Arabs and Jews would be on their way to self-determination. Balfour's expectation was that the Arabs would be willing to share a small sliver of the vast Mideast landscape with the Jews. Indeed, on March 3, 1919 Faisal encouragingly wrote Zionist leader Felix Frankfurter: "We Arabs, especially the educated among us look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement."

Tragically, pragmatists like Faisal did not carry the day. Instead, anti-Zionist Arab riots instigated by the fanatical Husseini clan were launched in 1920. London immediately went wobbly and embarked on a series of moves that first backtracked and then reversed its Balfour Declaration commitments.

To assuage Arab demands, Britain brought Abdullah from Arabia to Eastern Palestine in November 1920. This immense area – today's Jordan – comprising four-fifths of the Palestine mandate promised to the Jews by Balfour was ceded to the Arabs by 1921. Put another way, 80 percent of Palestine as defined by the League of Nations was lopped off leaving the Jews only the area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean.

In 1937, in response to intensified Arab violence, Britain's Peel Commission called for further splitting the remaining 20% of Palestine to create an additional Arab state within what was supposed to be Jewish Palestine. The Zionists reluctantly acquiesced; the Arabs said no. By 1939, Neville Chamberlain had completely reneged on the Balfour Declaration and blocked Jewish immigration to Palestine just as the Nazi killing machine was going into lethal gear.

None of this can be blamed on Balfour who deserves to be remembered as a friend of the Jews. Statesmen do not act purely out of altruism and he like other British politicians were partly motivated by an exaggerated sense of Zionist influence in the international arena which they hoped to exploit for the war effort. At the same time, Balfour believed that Christian anti-Semitism had been a "disgrace" and wanted to make amends by providing the Jews with a "small notch" of territory, according to his biographer R.J.Q. Adams. In 1925, he famously helped dedicate the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. Like Theodor Herzl, Balfour may have assumed that British Jews would either thoroughly assimilate or choose to live in the Jewish homeland.

Ninety-four years after Balfour's declaration the right of the Jewish people to re-establish their national homeland is still rejected by even Palestinian Arab "moderates." The unremitting threat of renewed violence remains the Arabs' default position. Emboldened by the Gilad Schalit deal, Arab violence in Judea, Samaria and Gaza has seen an upswing. Cairo's renewed efforts to bring Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas together will perforce necessitate more militancy from Fatah rather than greater flexibility from Hamas. In the words of Mahmoud Zahhar, the notion that Hamas will ever make peace with Israel is "insane."

Sixty-four years after Palestinian Arabs rejected the partition plan, Abbas claims to be having second thoughts. Yet instead of negotiating with the Jewish state he is forging ahead at the UN for unilateral statehood without making peace with Israel.

Sadly, Abba Eban's 1973 quip that the Arabs "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" holds stubbornly true. To be fair, time does not stand completely still. Abbas-like moderates are operating only 64 years behind real time though for the "militants" of Hamas it's perpetually 1917.

Finally, A Palestinian 'Peace Now?'

THE NEW "FORCE" THAT JOEL GREENBERG AT THE WASHINGTON POST DISCOVERED

What if a group of youthful Palestinian activists fed up with Hamas and Fatah for leading the Palestinian Arabs -- over and over again -- down bloody, self-defeating dead ends was to emerge as a new political and social force? We might think of them as a sort of Palestinian "Peace Now."

Imagine a Palestinian movement revolted by militarism, religious fanaticism, chauvinism and bloodlust; exasperated with Ramallah-based Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas for placing a wreath on Yasir Arafat`s grave – of all places -- to mark the sacrifice festival of Eid al-Adha and challenging his decision to spend lavishly on violent Palestinian inmates released from Israeli prisons in the Gilad Schalit exchange. Imagine their necessarily more cautious compatriots in Gaza feeling put-off by Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh for telling Eid al-Adha worshippers that "sacrifices are sometimes not only [for] sheep [but as] a way in which we praise God."

Could not a Palestinian "Peace Now" emerge out of recognition that neither depraved violence nor automatic UN majorities has brought the Palestinians what they want? If anything, the Palestinians' effortless victories at UNESCO with more predicted in the General Assembly seem only to stoke Palestinian frustrations. Now, Palestinian expectations for obtaining Security Council recognition for a state -- without recognizing the rights of the Jewish people to a national homeland of their own -- are set to fizzle.

Sure enough, The Washington Post recently ran a feature about an avant-garde generation of activists on the West Bank and Gaza, men and women in the 20s, not Islamists, who are disillusioned with both Fatah and Hamas and uninspired by symbolic victories at the UN. These youth were born around the time of the first intifada and entered their teens during the second intifada. The newspaper's Joel Greenberg, a veteran Israel-based advocacy journalist, came upon this "still-undefined, embryonic group of a few hundred" which Post headline writers billed as a potential "new political and social force."

Had Greenberg come upon a group of radical future Palestinian leaders ready for painful concessions to achieve reconciliation, mutual recognition and coexistence with the Jewish state? For his narrative hook, he focuses on an attractive 22-year old university student named Hurriyah Ziada who has been "active in protesting the Israeli occupation of the West Bank." We are rapidly disabused of any notion that Ziada merely wants to push Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines. In fact, creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israel is for her "inadequate." She is not interested in exchanging territory for peace and certainly not in pursuing a two-state solution. Instead, her activism is directed at creating a single Muslim-majority country from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea that would be demographically boosted by the "return" of some 750,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 War plus millions of their descendants now living in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq. As for the six million Jewish Israelis, Ziada would munificently grant this new minority in Greater Palestine "equal rights."

Instead of rolling his eyes at such warmed over Arab rejectionism, Greenberg presents Ziada's vision for the disappearance of Israel as a "human and civil rights" breakthrough something like the "American civil rights movement" and the "struggle to end apartheid in South Africa."

Why would the Washington Post attempt to sanitize the old Palestinian Arab agenda and present it as something practically progressive? Perhaps because their man in Israel so opposes a Jewish presence over the Green Line that he once served as a spokesman for Hamoked, yet another EU-funded NGO devoted to promoting Palestinian interests in the "Occupied Territories." While he served in the Israeli army (though reportedly refusing reserve duty in Lebanon), Greenberg's soft-spot for the Palestinian narrative has long permeated his reporting. He'd like to think that Arab opposition to the occupation "generally refers to bombing and shooting attacks on Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza." He adhered to this blinkered view even in 2004 when Israelis within the Green Line were daily being targeted. While no one denies that the Arabs in Judea and Samaria feel themselves "occupied," the possibility that the land itself is "disputed" has seldom been integral to Greenberg's reporting.

As for Ziada, Greenberg tells us that her father is a member of a "militant leftist faction" and her brother is a "member of Fatah's armed wing. Militant? Armed? The apple does not fall far from the tree for Ziada rules out -- albeit disingenuously – any compromise with the Zionist enterprise: “When I have kids, I don’t want them stuck in the West Bank,” Ziada declares. “I want the right to move freely. I want to go to Jerusalem, the city where I was born and to the village my family was kicked out from in 1948.”

What the 22 year-old may not recollect is that before the suicide bombers of the second intifada West Bank and Gaza motorists could drive unimpeded throughout Israel. If, as she claims, she was born within the Jerusalem municipality to parents who were legal residents chances are she would have a blue Israeli ID cards and could move freely about the country. She told Greenberg that her family had been "kicked out" of the subsequently "destroyed" village of al-Falauja (not far from the Gaza Strip). But her family might be living there still had an earlier Palestinian leadership not rejected the UN's 1947 Partition Plan for a two-state solution and, more to the point, had gunmen from al-Falauja not laid siege to neighboring Jewish communities and attacked Haganah food and water convoys delivering them aid.

Greenberg's spotlights the "wall of apathy" Ziada and her comrades in this imagined new political and social force need to overcome in agitating against Israel. The older generation is "exhausted" while her other cohorts are "alienated from established political movements." Ziada, though, is committed to "creative nonviolent action" doublespeak for violent confrontation with the IDF. "The cost of getting rid of the occupation" -- by which she means the Jewish state in its entirety -- "is far less than the cost of living under it for a long time to come.” For now Ziada appears content to build "mud houses for people whose homes" were capriciously razed by the Zionist authorities.

Truth be told, Ziada's supposedly new ideas meld perfectly with the standard Palestinian mindset. An October 2011 poll conducted by Nabil Kukali's Palestinian Center for Public Opinion found that a staggering 89.8 percent of respondents said they would rather have "no peace deal" and no "independent state" if it meant giving up "the Right of Return."

Far from uncovering a new political and social force among the Palestinians, Greenberg's story demonstrates that across the generational divide the Palestinians remain appallingly unrealistic and intransigent. The reason is all too plain: The moderates have been assassinated leaving Fatah and Hamas in-charge. Sadly, in opposing the "limited political horizons of the Palestinian leadership" Ziada and her comrades are not pushing Abbas and Haniyeh to reconcile with the Jews but toward war without end.

To Be a Jewish University Student in Britain

One way to think of British Jewry is to focus on its slow and steady decline: 270,000 souls, demographically graying; synagogue affiliation on a downward spiral; out-marriage running at between 30-50 percent. The possibility of anti-Semitism a constant with 283 verified incidents reported in the first six months of 2011. Of these 41 were categorized as "extremely violent" and 11 took place on campus. The line between despising Israel and holding Jews in contempt has been blurred beyond recognition with the Guardian and Independent leading the way and even the once respectable Times joining in.

A more nuanced take, however, would view the community as a sort of gradually dying star: moribund yet illuminated. The "strictly Orthodox" are growing in number. Culture is thriving. Next month there will be another Jewish Film Festival. Over the Christmas holidays hundreds will gather in Coventry for the 30th annual Limmud Conference, which bills itself as a "carnival of Jewish learning." Construction will soon begin on a new Jewish community center in northwest London. There are more kosher restaurants in London today than there was after World War II when the Jewish population crested at about 450,000. It is not remarkable nowadays to spot young men openly wearing kipot on the London Underground – surely a sign of a community at ease. Hundreds gather every fall at the Regent's Park Bandstand to enjoy Kletzmer music in the shadow of London's Central Mosque.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, British Jewish life can be "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." To flip through the pages of the Jewish Chronicle one could erroneously conclude that its readers are desperate for any scrap of news about anti-Semitism, mesmerized by features on the Holocaust and famished – despite a steady diet in the British press – for more critical reportage of "east Jerusalem settlements" and uprooted Palestinian olive trees.

How the fate of British Jewry will play itself out will depend greatly on its next generation of leaders -- today's university students comprising a miniscule 0.5% of the country's 1.6 million undergraduates. Their attitudes have now been mined in a comprehensive survey conducted by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, a think-tank with loose ties to the Board of Deputies of British Jewry. As one would have expected, the younger generation is mostly pessimistic about their community's future and troubled about the way current leaders are managing its affairs, according to the report.

The survey authors, David Graham and Jonathan Boyd, note that the formative experiences of today's university cohort – all born in the late 1980s and early 1990s-- encompass the July 7, 2005 London bombings (by Islamist terrorists) and Operation Cast Lead (the 2008-2009 IDF campaign to halt Hamas rocket fire from Gaza into Israel).
It is a generation that came of age in a "multi-cultural" England where Judeo-Christian values are not dominant. Britain's Muslim population stands at 2.87 million and growing; Islam is ascendant and Christianity in decline. Mohammed is most popular name for baby boys in London. On a good month, perhaps 1.7 million, mostly older worshippers attend Church of England services. The Church's hierarchy is riddled by clergy who do not believe in God.

In this milieu, and like their cohorts elsewhere in our post-modern, post-industrial, digital age being Jewish is mostly a personal lifestyle choice. With all that, the report's findings are generally encouraging. Seventy-nine percent agree that having a "religious identity" is integral to being Jewish; 95% basically embrace the idea of Jewish peoplehood. Though like many young Jews they conflate what it means to be Jewish with the Holocaust (83%) and anti-Semitism (75%).

By the time they reach university a majority will have had some formal Jewish education (though some will have been barred from attending day schools such as JFS over not being Orthodox). Nearly all will have been members of youth movements; about half arrive at university Jewishly observant, eating only kosher meat at home, for example. Remarkably, 27% are Sabbath observers. Most (59%) say their closest friends are Jewish. At the same time, of those who have had romantic relationships, just 40% have had exclusively Jewish partners. A clear majority of traditional respondents, but only a minority of progressives, agreed that it is important for Jews to marry other Jews.

Whatever their views, most Jewish students cluster (whether consciously or not) around a small number of universities mostly Leeds, Birmingham and Nottingham, Manchester, Cambridge, Oxford, and Bristol, and various London-area colleges. On campus, the majority professes to be open about their Jewishness and 72% say "supporting Israel" is integral to their Jewish identity. (Among the broader community, 80 percent feel a "commitment" to Israel.) An overwhelming majority has visited Israel and, no less important, hold predominantly positive attitudes. Eleven percent, however, is indifferent, ambivalent or negative toward the Jewish state. The key variable in attachment to Israel is level of commitment to tradition. The more observant students are the more emphatically pro-Israel.

In focus groups students found fault with the Jewish media and establishment for overemphasizing anti-Israel sentiment on campus, according to the report. Yet 42% nationwide say they have experienced anti-Semitism. And fully a third of Jewish students in London (where British Jewish life is centered) have experienced Jew-hatred. Indeed, a former head of the National Union of Students (NUS) who has a Jewish-sounding name but is not Jewish had to be escorted away from a Manchester demonstration against tuition hikes last year when louts in the audience chanted “Tory Jew scum."

This year, under different leadership, the NUS first adopted and then scrapped a range of anti-Zionist resolutions.

And last week, Mike Freer a pro-Israel Member of Parliament (yes, such a species still survives) was threatened in his London constituency offices by a Muslim crowd. While most non-Jewish university students are indifferent to Mideast issues, Jewish undergraduates prefer to keep their pro-Israel sentiments to themselves rather than risk the opprobrium of pro-Arab rabble-rousers on campus. Muslim extremists are disproportionately the perpetrators of anti-Semitic outrages.

Perhaps it is in this context -- rather than the dovish views of British Jewry generally -- that we should ponder the pathetic plan by the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) leadership to distribute both Palestinian and Israeli flags on campuses. The risible idea is to prove that Jewish students, too, support "freedom, justice and equality." It will be interesting to see whether the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) begins distributing Israeli flags to prove it has come around to supporting a two-state solution.

To be fair, when University of College London President and Provost Malcolm Grant outrageously declared that campus anti-Semitism was not a problem, the UJS called on him to "stop ignoring the harmful influence of extremists," though the former head of the Jewish student union at UCL said more plainly: "He knows this is an outright lie." In any event, it is left to unapologetically pro-Israel groups like "Stand With Us" to proactively campaign for Israel and against Palestinian Arab intransigence.

The authors of the report, David Graham and Jonathan Boyd, argue that it's time to put campus hostility toward Israel into perspective. "Anti-Semitism continues to be a significant issue on campus, but it is also subtle and complex" and on the whole, a reader might conclude, students have become inured to toxic hatred of Jews and Israel.

Boyd acknowledged that Jewish students can't articulate pro-Israel sentiments without "grief." Non-Brits might read it as quintessential British understatement, but the report takes cold comfort in finding that students are more concerned about grades, relationships and future aspirations than day-to-day anti-Semitism. The problem may be so endemic, crushing and discouraging that pondering it for too long can sap morale.

Or as Boyd argues more delicately, anti-Israel hostility "should not dominate our view, not least because over-emphasizing it appears to be affecting the Jewish identities of this young generation."
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