An inconvenient truth

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
10 December 09

Yesterday evening, the historian Andrew Roberts delivered a remarkable address at the annual dinner of the Anglo-Israel Association. I reproduce it here in full, with no further comment. M.P.

My Lords, Ladies & Gentlemen,

It’s a great honour to be invited to address you, especially on this the 60th anniversary of AIA, and I’d like to take the opportunity of this anniversary to look at the overall story of the relationship between Britain and Israel, and to try to strip away some of the myths.

Because it seems to me that for all the undoubted statesmanship implicit in Arthur Balfour’s Declaration of November 1917, promising ‘a National Home for the Jewish People’, it doesn’t mean that Britain has ever been much more than a fair-weather friend to Jewish national aspirations. The Declaration itself was at least in part conceived to keep Eastern European and Russian Jews supporting the Great War after the Bolshevik Revolution, and Chaim Weizmann’s preferred wording of ‘a Jewish State’ was turned down by the British Foreign Office. As David Ben-Gurion wrote at the time: ‘Britain has made a magnificent gesture … But only the Hebrew people can transform this right into tangible fact: only they, with body and soul, with their strength and capital, must build their National Home and bring about their national redemption.’

Sure enough, at the Versailles Conference and its ancillary meetings up to 1922, although Britain was given the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, the Jewish National Home was not established. During the Mandate period there was an observable tension between the CO, which was responsible for administering Palestine and wanted to do so within the terms of the (admittedly self-contradictory) Balfour Declaration, and the FO, which feared that allowing the de facto creation of a Jewish State would alienate Arabs. In 1937 the Peel Commission recommended ending the Mandate and partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with population transfers of 225,000 Arabs from Galilee, an outcome Ben-Gurion said [quote] ‘could give us something which we have never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the First and Second Temples’. Nonetheless, both the Arabs and the 20th Zionist Congress rejected Peel’s recommendations, to the palpable relief of the Foreign Office, which concentrated its own opposition to it on the basis of its supposed impracticality.

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