Mark Regev: Balfour Declaration, Palestinian weaponization of post-colonial guilt
Next week’s anniversary of the Balfour Declaration will once again highlight the seemingly insurmountable Israeli-Palestinian divide.How TIME reported the North African exodus in 1962
While Israelis venerate Britain’s decree of November 2, 1917, when His Majesty’s Government officially endorsed “Jewish Zionist aspirations,” Palestinians exploit the very same British pronouncement as a weapon in their war to negate Israel’s existential legitimacy.
For Israelis, Lord Balfour’s famous letter to Lord Rothschild is both an undeniable inflection point in their history and a genuine cause for celebration. It was the first time (since Cyrus the Great in antiquity) that a major world power publicly declared its support for the Jews’ desire to return and reconstitute their homeland.
The declaration also had a significant practical impact, leading directly to the pro-Zionist decisions taken at the 1920 San Remo Conference by the victorious allied powers, and to the League of Nations giving the Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain in order to “secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home.”
The eminent Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said characterized the declaration as colonialist collusion. In his words, it was “made by a European power… about a non-European territory… in a flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory.”
Twenty-first-century Palestinian nationalists follow Said’s lead and manipulate the contemporary post-colonial guilt widely felt across the West to assert that the Palestinian people remain colonialism’s greatest victim, and that hence, the international community owes the Palestinians an immeasurable moral debt.
The independence of Morocco, Tunisia and now Algeria—joyful news to Moslems—has for Jews signaled another vast and melancholy exodus like so many other uprootings since Moses. A decade ago, 250,000 Jews lived in Morocco. 150,000 in Algeria and 100,000 in Tunisia; now about half of them have left. Last week alone, 5,000 North African Jews arrived by ship and plane in Marseille. By 1975, Jewish leaders estimate, their communities in North Africa will be reduced to less than 15% of their former size.Honest Reporting: This Date In History: Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat Named Nobel Peace Prize Winners
Jews were living and working in North Africa before the Romans came. Some of them are Berber tribesmen whose ancestors were converted from paganism before the 7th century A.D. Others are Sephardim—Descendants of Spanish Jews who were forced into exile across the Mediterranean by Visigothic persecution in the 6th century or the Inquisition of the 15th. A third strain consists of European Jews who settled in North African cities after World War II. All three have found that exile is the inevitable aftermath of independence.
In Tunisia, President Habib Bourguiba promised that Jews would be allowed to practice their religion in peace: “While I am alive, not a hair on Jewish heads will be touched.” But Tunisian Jews are trapped in the cold war between Israel and the Arab states. Bourguiba’s government has disbanded even Jewish religious organizations on the ground that they promote Zionism, and Jews fear that other Arab countries could force Tunisia to impose restrictions upon them.
In Morocco, the government placed restrictions on Jewish emigration until last October, and fortnight ago closed down the office of the agency in Casablanca that chartered ships and planes for Jews eager to leave the country. Although Jews who leave for Israel are officially forbidden to return to their homes, there is little overt anti-Semitism in Morocco. But emigration goes on, and businessmen in Casablanca complain that they cannot find Jewish labor. “Morocco is down the drain for us,” says one Jewish cafe owner.
In Algeria, Jews fear the onset of independence this week even more than their Christian pied-noir neighbors. Many were active supporters of the underground Secret Army; in Constantine, for example, the first anti-Moslem commando force was composed largely of Jews—and the F.L.N. has not forgotten it.
On October 27, 1978, then-Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat were named winners of the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to end more than thirty years of conflict during which Cairo spearheaded four full-scale Arab-initiated wars against the Jewish state (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973).Hillel Neuer: Warrior for Israel in Geneva
Five months later, on March 26, 1979, the two leaders signed a formal US-brokered peace treaty in Washington, D.C.
In retrospect, the historic agreement seemingly paved the way for the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords, which, in turn, laid the groundwork for the October 26, 1994 peace deal signed between Israel and Jordan.
While Jerusalem has, as a result, maintained peaceful, albeit predominantly frosty, relations with both Cairo and Amman, the conflict with the Palestinians remains unresolved.
To mark the above-mentioned occasions, below please find links to materials HonestReporting previously produced in order to help elucidate the ramifications — and complexities — of these and other current related events.
UN Watch’s defense of Israel against undue bias, and Neuer’s own related outspokenness in the media, may prevent potential collaborations with other promoters of universal human rights. But Neuer is unapologetic.
“Everyone will look at things in their own way and based on their own perspective, milieu and pressures. Some may be uncomfortable with us. But the reality is that we are who we are,” Neuer said.
Where does Neuer see himself a decade from now? Still at the helm of UN Watch, “fighting the good fight.”
If the workaholic can find the time, he would like to write a book on how the human rights movement “went off the rails.”
“It began with moral clarity fighting against Hitler, with people like Eleanor Roosevelt and René Cassin and has ended up with people like [Human Rights Watch executive director] Ken Roth who attacks Israel as a war criminal every single day, and basically compares Israel to Nazis,” Neuer said.
“It bothers me how the human rights movement got so subverted and skewed, and I want to understand how that happened,” he said.