Andrew Roberts, court historian and now Baron Roberts of Belgravia, curtesy of Prime Minister Johnson, was once described as “the authorised apple polisher to the Blair-Bush dyarchy.” This was due to his fulsome support for the US/UK New World Order project.

He has also been a long-standing friend and uncritical supporter of Israel and its deeds.

Roberts once told an audience, in a strident defence of the Balfour Declaration, that

“Churchill ultimately asserted the right of Jews to a National Home in Palestine to something even more politically incorrect than Tobias Ellwood could ever imagine – the right of conquest… there was no such entity called Palestine on any Ottoman administrative or political map and there was no distinct Palestinian national identity at the time of the Balfour Declaration. Therefore, Mr. Elwood’s attempts are intellectual and historical nonsense and gratuitously offensive to the State of Israel in this the centenary year of the Declaration.”

Tobias Elwood, a Tory MP formerly of the British Army, had suggested that more could have been done to protect the rights of the Arab inhabitants in Britain’s establishment and building of the Jewish State. Roberts would have none of it.The historian was adamant that Israel’s right to exist was based on British Imperial conquest and the Arab inhabitants of Palestine had no political rights there. Their only rights lay in territories which the British provided for them, elsewhere, for services rendered in destroying the Ottoman State.

So much for history…

Roberts is an insistent supporter of the “historical record.” It is therefore rather appropriate that we record for the historical record his thoughts and views on Israel and its present orgy of destruction in Gaza, the West Bank and across the Middle East. They may be of great interest for future generations.

It should be pointed out that defending the concentration camps that were used in the past, to defeat the Boers or the Kenyan insurgency, is a very different thing than defending Israel’s activities in the present. The former involves the historian participating in historical debate with his peers while the latter involves an esteemed and titled academic defending an open ongoing ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide for which the historian is providing moral cover that facilitates its continuation.

Lord Roberts, as well as being Professor at the War Studies Department at King’s College, London, and the Lehrman Institute Lecturer at the New-York Historical Society, also sits on the boards or advisory councils of a number of think-tanks and other groups, including Policy Exchange, The Centre for Policy Studies, The Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, The UK National Defence Association, The London Jewish Cultural Centre, and Intelligence Squared US’s Intelligence Council. He is a Director of the Harry Guggenheim Foundation in New York and a founding member of President Jose Maria Aznar’s Friends of Israel Committee. He has long-standing connections to the neo-con Henry Jackson Society.

Back on 9 December 2009 Roberts was reported as follows in the Jewish Chronicle:

“Historian Andrew Roberts has launched a scathing attack on British policy towards Israel, claiming only Israel itself is prepared to defend Jews from a second Holocaust. Speaking at the Anglo-Israel Association’s annual dinner in London on Tuesday, Mr Roberts pledged to “strip away some of the myths” surrounding the relationship between the two countries.

The author said Britain had never been “much more than a fair-weather friend to Jewish national aspirations” and concluded: “In her hopes of averting the threat of a second Holocaust, only Israel can be relied upon to act decisively in the best interests of the Jews.”

Mr Roberts, whose books include studies of Hitler and Churchill, said the Foreign Office was “implicitly racist” and to blame for the fact no member of the Royal Family has visited Israel on an official visit.”

The Israeli “defence” against a “Second Holocaust” seems to mainly consist of inflicting a holocaust on everyone and anybody who does not submit to the objectives of the Zionist state.

Despite this vigorous attack on the most noble institutions of the British State, Andrew Roberts was still elevated to the House of Lords by Boris Johnson. It seems that criticism of the British State is no disloyalty when it is performed in the service of that state of great exception to the ordinary rules on things in the West.

Shortly after the events of October 7, 2023 Roberts was interviewed by CNN, along with US General David Petraeus, whom together the news channel referred to as “two eminent experts at warfare”. Both Petraeus and Roberts seemed to have a great sense of the opportunity October 7 presented to both Israel and the West to sort out unfinished business in the region. A month ago, on​ 18 June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face “the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people.” If Khamenei were to refuse, he added, “that improves our legitimacy and then reluctantly we blow them to smithereens.” That Petraeus was recommending Iran, a country of ninety million people, be reduced to the conditions the Israelis had reduced Gaza to after October 7, hardly occasioned comment in the media. It seems that “murderous threats from US officials against foreign leaders and their people no longer provoke shock, much less condemnation.” (London Review of Books, Vol. 47 No. 13 · 24 July 2025, The World since 7 October, Adam Shatz).

In the course of the 2023 interview, alongside Petraeus, about what Israel might/could do with the opportunity presented to it, Andrew Roberts stated his hope that great retribution would befall Hamas/Gaza for its resistance blow:

“The Yom Kippur War started with an Arab surprise attack and ended with a catastrophe for the Arab armies, so hopefully, there are some direct parallels with history in this latest Hamas attack. The Israeli army was within sight of Damascus and was only a few days away from Cairo when peace broke out in 1973.  So, there is a tremendous capacity in the IDF for taking the punches and returning them with vigour, which I’m assuming will be the case when it comes to Hamas.”

It is often said that when opponents of Zionist violence condemn Israel, they are really just attacking Jews. But it is pretty clear now that when supporters of Israel talk about defeating Hamas, they really mean eradicating the Palestinians.

When the British Parliament desired the producing of a report on the events of October 7 who did it turn to, to be the chair of the committee tasked with writing this report, but Lord Roberts. Why the British Parliament deemed it necessary to produce a report on these obscure foreign events is anyone’s guess, but it certainly had it in mind to produce a report of a very particular complexion, knowing that its chairman was a strong critic of the British State itself, on behalf of Israel.

The Times of Israel on 9 May 2025, under the banner “Israel at War – Day 648” reported on the publication of this recently published UK Parliamentary report in the interests of Israel:

“With its minute-by-minute timeline, copious testimony from survivors and eyewitnesses, and wealth of forensic evidence and open-source footage, the 316-page report produced by British parliamentarians last month detailing the terrible events of October 7, 2023, and is a comprehensive and meticulous account of the Hamas onslaught on Israel. That is unsurprising. The panel responsible for the “7 October Parliamentary Commission Report” was chaired by Andrew Roberts, a renowned historian, biographer and expert on warfare, from the Battle of Waterloo to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

It isn’t simply Roberts’s longstanding support for Israel that led him to agree to chair the commission, but his concern over continuing attempts to whitewash Hamas’s atrocities — an effort he compares to Holocaust denial.”

Lord Roberts told The Times of Israel that “There’s a movement afoot on behalf of Hamas and its sympathizers to pretend that October 7 never happened”. The report’s aim was to compile “a large amount of unimpeachable evidence to prove that it did.”

Roberts does not tell us who was saying that there had been no Hamas attack on October 7. He seems to have invented that fact purely for effect. There were many theories doing the round, particularly questioning how the Israelis had let down their guard so much when they seemed to know everything about everybody and there were suggestions that the IDF had done a large proportion of the killing themselves on October 7 by activating their “Hannibal Directive”. These were mainstream questions that arose within Israel itself. However, nobody of consequence suggested that October 7 never happened, that I noticed.

The Times of Israel reported that in the Jewish Chronicle of October 16, 2024 Lord Roberts (an idoliser of Churchill) had compared Israel’s contemporary position to that of Britain in 1940 (Finest Hour, Britain Stands Alone blah, blah, etc.):

“In that 12-month period from June 1940 to June 1941, Britain and her Commonwealth formed the tip of the spear against ‘the menace of tyranny,’ just as brave Israel today represents the tip of civilization’s spear against the tyranny and barbarism of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and exterminationism.”

Lord Roberts said he was convinced that Churchill would have recognized and sympathized with Israel’s position:

“He was a Zionist. He didn’t subscribe to the antisemitism that so many of the people of his age, class and background did. He was a supporter of the Balfour Declaration and believed that the ‘Judeo’ side of Judeo-Christian civilization… gave Christianity its ethics and its positive moral angle.

It strikes me as very clear that he would have been as outraged as any other decent, rational, logical human being about what had happened on October 7, and he would certainly have been in favour of a terrible punishment raining down on Hamas… He was a humanitarian and so he’d have wanted to have minimized the civilian casualties in Gaza, and I believe that the IDF have done that to the best of their ability.

The overlap between Hamas ideology and Nazi ideology is well coloured on the Venn diagram… The analogy between Hamas and the Nazis strikes me as completely obvious one. I think you’d have to be deliberately obtuse not to see the connections. Wars are truly terrible things, which is why you shouldn’t start them, and why you should fight them in as humanitarian a way as you can, which I think is what Israel has done.”

Roberts could have mentioned Churchill’s intriguing and most relevant statement about the Palestinians which he gave to the Peel Commission in 1937: “I do not admit the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time.” This is the position that the Peel Commission in effect adopted, to gradually build up Jewish colonist numbers until the existing Arab inhabitants were in a minority in Palestine. (see Angela Clifford, Serfdom or Ethnic Cleansing, A British Discussion on Palestine, Athol Books).

As Israel’s punitive expedition got underway in Gaza, in the way he had hoped for with the IDF acting with “vigour” and producing a “catastrophe” for the Arabs, Lord Roberts is on record in Hansard for the following contribution to a House of Lords debate on 8 February 2024:

“My Lords, even if we were to take as accurate Hamas’s statistics and the 27,500 figure—there is no reason why we should; we do not do that with Putin or ISIS—if one subtracts the number of Gazans who have been killed by the quarter or so of the Islamic Jihad and Hamas rockets that fall short, one is left with a less than 2:1 ratio of civilians to Hamas terrorists killed, of whom there have been more than 9,000 so far. War is hell, and every individual civilian death is a tragedy, but—I speak as a military historian—less than 2:1 is an astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields. It is a testament to the professionalism, ethics and values of the Israel Defense Forces.” 

That contribution was made after Israel was “at war” for around 150 days. It is nonsense. In Ukraine the ratio of military to civilian casualties is probably around 5:1 whereas in Gaza there are the exact reverse in favour of civilian killing. How long would the IDF last in the field against a real army like the Armed Forces of Ukraine one might ask?

Lord Roberts’ view of Churchill the humanitarian is frankly ridiculous considering his well-known record in relation to Ireland, Iraq and India and various other places in the world he dealt with. Has it not recently been revealed in “Operation Unthinkable” that he wished to nuclear bomb the Soviet Union in 1945, his close ally, that helped Britain end up on the winning side in World War II, and Churchill, himself, to craft his fable about it? If that is not a despicable sneak attack, what isn’t?

Roberts, of course, refers to Churchill’s reported “unease” at the mass incineration of hundreds of thousands of women and children in the Allied terror bombing of largely defenceless German cities. But like the current UK Government’s unease at Israel’s actions in Gaza it does little for the victims of massacre but gild the record for the collaborators in attempted genocide.

But Lord Roberts himself, unlike his hero Churchill, seemingly has no “unease” at the fate of Gazans and is completely unrepentant about his unconditional support for Israel and what it chooses to do to them. He has, in fact, “doubled down” on that since his early enthusiasm for Israel’s efforts. 

Roberts was interviewed recently, on 11 April 2025, after the Parliamentary report’s publication, by the School of War podcast. Here are some of the things he told the interviewer on the subject of the report:

“Aaron MacLean: This is a remarkable document. It’s a long document, it’s exhaustive, it includes, among other things, a detailed minute-by-minute breakdown of the attack on Israel on the 7th of October, statistics of the victims, an analysis of the causes. Let me ask you this. This is a product of the British Parliament, this attack, of course, just to stick with the basics, occurred in Israel. There were some British citizens caught up in it but, nevertheless, it does strike one as a bit odd that the British Parliament would feel the need to produce such a document. Why? Why is it important that you produce this piece of work?

Andrew Roberts: Well, Britain actually did lose 18 killed that day and we also had people taken hostage so, in that sense, it was the worst single-day atrocity against Britain since 9/11. And also, we thought it was important because there’s an attempt at denialism that’s going on in Britain at the moment where Islamists and Hamas supporters and so on are actually pretending it didn’t happen, there were no rapes or murders on the 7th of October in Southern Israel. And so, we very much wanted to have a document that both, today and also in 50 and 100 years’ time, can refute that…

The Hamas leader in Doha has been arguing that civilian deaths were collateral damage that you get in any military operation. It is completely and utterly untrue and our report totally irrefutably crushes this line of arguments of Hamas. In fact, the exact opposite was the case, what they really wanted to do was to marginalize the armed forces and either destroy them or keep them bottled up whilst the real object of the operation, which was to kill and capture as many civilians as possible, was undertaken. So, it’s one of those big lies that Goebbels used to speak of where you actually lie so much that it helps you with the sheer enormity of the untruth and our report makes it very, very clear about the planning and the intent of the operation was against civilians.

It is very important to understand that our civilization is the Judeo-Christian civilization, it’s not just the Christian civilization. The Jews and everything that they have given to the world is an absolutely essential part of understanding that civilization and the kind of barbarism that was unleashed on the Jews that terrible day is something that, as a military historian, I’m interested in, of course, because it’s very, very rare. I’m not saying barbarity is rare in war, of course it isn’t but what one tends to get historically in war is a death frenzy, a killing frenzy that takes place during the actual operation because of the worst aspects of human nature being unleashed under the circumstances.

But that isn’t what happened on the 7th of October, what happened on the 7th of October was the deliberate creation by Hamas of this killing frenzy. They set out to go into a killing frenzy which is something that I haven’t seen in history very often… There were pogroms where Jews are killed and raped and murdered but not, unbelievably, sadistically tortured and there are other pogroms, of course, in which they were tortured. But to send your men as Hamas did into an operation deliberately wanting them to go into a sadistic and, for the victims, humiliating psychosexual kind of killing spree is particularly barbaric thing which is why I do equate the barbarism with the civilization…

Denialism over October 7 comes straight from Holocaust denialism, of course, which at least took years to come about, whereas this denialism actually started before the killings were over. The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, in London, got in touch with the Metropolitan Police in London to ask for the right to have a demonstration, i.e., a celebration actually before the killings were over and long before, three weeks before Israel fought back in Gaza. So, you have this combination of people trying to blame the victims and also using Holocaust denialism as their template essentially. You have those things that go together and, therefore, create this kind of psychosis…

Obviously, anti-Semitism metastasizes in each generation and has done so for thousands of years, it’s constant, it’s a bacillus that’s constantly moving and changing. And as you say, a really very dark and unpleasant side of it is making itself known in the United States – the anti-Semitism of the right – which, of course, unfortunately because we catch colds when America coughs, it’s not long before we are going to see anti-Semitism on the right raise its ugly head again in Britain. It tended to die out in the 1950s at the end of the Mosley Blackshirt movement but of course it can flare up at any stage, at any time. So, you have that in the same time that the post 1967 Left hatred of Israel has been brought to such a head as it is at the moment. So, as far as Israel is concerned, it’s caught in a perfect storm, unfortunately…

For the revolutionary Left Israel is very much an ally of the great Satan America and little Satan Britain. And so, as a result, therefore, all this business about how it’s all been built by colonists, it’s all about colonizing as though the Jews haven’t been in the Holy Land for 3,000 years, it’s an attempt to superimpose anti-colonial, anti-imperialist views onto the Middle Eastern situation where, in fact, historically, it has no purchase whatsoever intellectually. But nonetheless, it fits in so nicely with the leftist worldview that they can’t bear not going down that road with regard to the right, of course, especially the ultra-right as you are seeing in United States at the moment with various people attempting to defend and even justify Adolf Hitler, it’s a natural offshoot from anybody who thinks that way as well…”

It seems rather quaint that Roberts would make such an issue of the deliberate planning that went into the limited Hamas military operation when it is obvious that Israel devotes so much of its time and effort to planning future operations in various places like Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran with extensive armies of agents, technology and meticulous planning.

Roberts is also making up facts for effect again in this interview. Where is the anti-Semitic Right these days in Britain? The British Right, since the demise of the BNP, is firmly anti-Muslim these days and stridently pro-Israel.

After a historical detour the interviewer returned to the subject of Israel.

Aaron MacLean: Well, sticking with the Middle East for the moment, we have the Israelis operating back in Gaza again, continued low grade events up in the north and you have this looming Israeli-Turkish confrontation developing in Syria and it’s an open question how that’s going to be resolved. How do you see things playing out? And in particular in Gaza, how do you see things playing out? There was talk a month or two ago now from President Trump saying that the United States was going to take some level of responsibility for Gaza. It’s unclear where that stands, it’s unclear if that is actually US policy. You wrote a good piece about it in the Free Beacon, I’m just curious to know how you think things are going to play out.

Andrew Roberts: Oh, I don’t think it’s going to happen. I can’t see Egypt or Jordan taking hundreds of thousands, even millions of people because they don’t want enormous Palestinian populations in their countries. Why should they and who else would, they’re an irredentist population which nobody else wants to take in so I don’t think it will happen. What I argued in the Free Beacon was that, if it did happen, then the Palestinian people really have lost any right to stop it, to complain about it. If you’ve spent decades saying you are living in an open concentration camp, then you can’t really complain if somebody wants to let you out of it.

And so, historically, I gave 10, I think, examples over the last century of peoples who have been moved en masse in their hundreds of thousands and even millions sometimes against their will, sometimes not but mostly against their will. And they don’t have the right to complain because they usually started conflicts and then lost them and that’s exactly, of course, what Hamas has done. It hasn’t lost yet but it certainly would have by the time any major population transfers ever took place.”

I have never heard the Palestinians referred to as “an irredentist population” before. Irredentism is advocation of the restoration of a territory to a people/state that formerly belonged to them/it. That is a curious description of the Palestinians from a Zionist point of view. There is perhaps accuracy in it considering that Palestine was detached from Ottoman Syria to make a territory for the British Balfour Declaration. And then that “national home for the Jews” was prepared by Britain for a future Jewish state, under the Empire. And then the native Arab population was whittled away from 1948 and driven to other locations like Jordan etc. But that is hardly the classic irredentism.

In the Washington Free Beacon and The Free Press 2 February 2025, Roberts had argued “The Historical Case for Trump’s Gaza Plan.” That, of course, was the US President’s plan to bulldoze Gaza and construct a “Riviera of the Middle East” where Israelis and rich Arabs and others could relax and sip aperitifs on their deckchairs on a site of genocide that had been cleansed of its former population.

Lord Roberts wrote in his advocacy of Trump’s plan as a final solution to the Palestinian problem: 

“Again and again in the past, peoples who unleash unprovoked aggressive wars against their neighbours and are then defeated lose either their government or their sovereignty, or both.

Much of the international condemnation of President Donald Trump’s “Riviera” plan for Gaza rests on the assumption that the Palestinians retain sovereignty over the territory, despite all the events that have taken place since their incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, and that they also continue to have the right to choose their own government.

In fact, historical precedent suggests that Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel that day, and its condign punishment by the Israel Defense Forces, have severe implications for whether the Gazans still have the right to decide their own destiny, and who governs them.

For again and again in the past, peoples who unleash unprovoked aggressive wars against their neighbours and are then defeated—as the Gazans have been on any conceivable metric—lose either their government or their sovereignty, or both. It would be strange were Hamas somehow to buck this historical trend.”

Lord Roberts then cited the example of the Boer Republics, who were subjected to harsh British punitive means of military sweeps, crop and animal destruction, blockhouses and finally concentration camps to teach them a lesson. He does not remember, however, that the future leader of the British Liberal Party and Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, referred to these as “methods of barbarism.” Roberts is a very selective historian!

Roberts then introduces the US terror-bombing North Korean model for the punishment of “aggressors”:

“After North Korea launched its vicious, unprovoked attack on South Korea in June 1950, it was punished so severely by the American-led United Nations force that it lost over a million dead. (In those happier days, the United Nations supported countries that were invaded rather than the invaders.) North Korea lost territory in the armistice in 1953 and has been a pariah state ever since.

North Korea may have lost as much as 20 percent of its population in that war. The Gazan Health Ministry is an arm of Hamas propaganda and routinely lies about the statistics of killed and wounded there, but even if we take its numbers as accurate, the total number of Gazans killed in this war has been about 2 percent, which is not a figure that in any way aligns with accusations of genocide. If the IDF had wished to commit genocide, it would have killed far more than 2.04 percent of Gazans. By stark contrast, Adolf Hitler killed over 50 percent of all of Europe’s Jews in what was a genuine genocide.”

Roberts then relates other examples of righteous punishment being inflicted by the West, including Britain’s on Argentina for the Falklands/Malvinas, Iraq for invading Kuwait and having weapons of mass destruction, and Serbia for its massacres of Bosnian Muslims etc.

He then notes:

“The witness of history is therefore fairly uniform: If a government undertakes a vicious and unprovoked attack on a neighbouring country, and subsequently loses on the battlefield, it cannot then expect to continue to exercise sovereignty and avoid population transfers. In a similar vein, Arab governments cannot in the same breath argue that Gaza is ‘a concentration camp,’ but also that its citizens should not be allowed to leave such a beloved homeland. They can choose one propaganda line or the other, but not, simultaneously, both.

Mass population transfers have been common after wars. The classic example are those of the late 1940s, when there were no fewer than 20 different groups—including the Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus of the Punjab; the Crimean Tartars; the Japanese Kuril and Sakhalin Islanders; the Soviet Chechen, Ingush, and Balkars; even the Italians of Istria and Dalmatia—who were moved to different regions. At the time of the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, over 800,000 Jews from Arab lands were forced out of lands that they had lived in for centuries.

All of those peoples mentioned, with the exception of one, chose to try to make the best of their new environs, and most eventually succeeded. The sole exception has been the Palestinians, because Hamas and its predecessors have always unquestioningly chosen the destruction of Israel and the opportunity to massacre Jews over the best interests of their own people.

If each of the 22 Arab states undertook to receive 100,000 Gazans, the Strip could be the home to the remaining 100,000, living and working on Trump’s “Riviera.” The reason that can never in fact happen is the Arab states’ and the United Nations’ wholly cynical and self-interested policy since 1948 to use Palestinian refugees as a continual destabilizing force against Israel.

As the international community yelps with indignation at Donald Trump’s remarks and their implications regarding Gazans’ sovereignty and Hamas’s right to govern there, history is on the president’s side.”

That enthusiasticand open support for ethnic cleansing by one of Britain’s most famous historians needs no comment. It should be just left stand for people to read in amazement.

All of this came to the attention of the present writer upon investigating Arthur Bryant’s lost 1940 book, Unfinished Victory. Britain’s most popular and most read historian of the period made the terrible mistake of writing a book explaining how the First World War of 1914 was leading to the Second World War of 1939. Bryant naively thought he would serve his country’s and humanity’s interests by doing something to help prevent the descent toward the inevitable he could see before his own eyes. Knowledge, he believed, had come too late in 1914 and it was the time to speak before, rather than after, a second catastrophe occurred. And he went, on Chamberlain’s request, to Germany in order to talk sense to the Germans before it was too late for Europe.

But just as the book went into publication war broke out and the character of England changed to warfighting and propaganda mode. And this time there was no retreat from the narrative written by Churchill, himself, to justify the British blundering into war that finally put paid to Empire and 50 million.

Sir Arthur Bryant realising his terrible error attempted to buy up every copy of Unfinished Victory he could lay his hands upon. His well-intentioned book had all the appearance of a shit he had done on an altar.

In his 1994 book Eminent Churchillians (interestingly dedicated to David Trimble’s biographer, Dean Godson) Andrew Roberts devotes a chapter to Bryant entitled Patriotism: The Last Refuge of Sir Arthur Bryant. It is a particularly vicious assassination of the fondly remembered historian in which Roberts says:

“Bryant was a Nazi sympathiser and fascist fellow-traveller, who only narrowly escaped internment as a potential traitor in 1940. He was also, incidentally, a supreme toady, fraudulent scholar and humbug.” (p.288)

Knowing Roberts unconditional support for the activities of Israel today his unwarranted and extravagant hatred of Sir Arthur Bryant becomes, at last, understandable.

I will deal with Bryant’s very interesting and informative Unfinished Victory in a coming series with the aim of giving it the attention it deserves.

Postscript – Andrew Roberts defence of the Balfour Declaration (Published as ‘The Historical Paths to the Balfour Declaration’ by the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs)

It is important not to impose our views of current political concepts on the actions of the Lloyd George Cabinet of 1917, particularly regarding the national self-determination of the Arab peoples. The fact that Arabs made up the majority of the population of Palestine in 1917 was not considered grounds for objecting to a national home for the Jews because, at the time, different peoples, languages and ethnic and racial groups were expected to coexist under the protection of the Ottoman, German, British, French and Austro-Hungarian empires. Accordingly, the Palestinian Arabs under the Ottomans were regarded like the Ruthenians, Sudeten Germans, Rumanians in Hungary and Hungarians in Rumania, or any other group that had their own ethnicity but not their own nation-state or even nascent sense of nationhood, let alone an established national identity.

Furthermore, British imperialist thought supported the idea of development and did not pay attention to democratic principles such as one-man-one-vote. British statesmen assumed that Jews would develop the Holy Land in the productive and impressive way that people of British origin had done in East Africa, South Africa, Malaya, Australia & New Zealand. The word “settler” was not a pejorative term, as it is in Leftist parlance today. In fact, it was widely recognized that native populations would benefit most from the work of “settlers,” as far as shared communications, irrigation projects, employment, transport infrastructure, and increased food production were concerned. Lord Balfour rightly assumed that the Jews would make the desert bloom and that the local Arabs would benefit from such efforts. Indeed, the entire Mandate system of the League of Nations included ideas of development in addition to concepts of grand strategy or empire.

At the time of the Declaration, Britain was encouraging nationalist movements throughout the Middle East. In the speech quoted above, Lord Balfour referred to the Turks in a pejorative manner, stating that Britain “has freed them, the Arab race, from the tyranny of their brutal conqueror, who has kept them under his heel for these many centuries. I hope they remember it is we who established the independent Arab sovereignty of the Hejaz.” The Arab revolt against the Turks in 1917 was nationalistic and it was expected that Zionism would be part of it and not opposed to it. Unlike Bedouin nationalism, however, which was an established fact by 1917, the local Arabs had shown no propensity to rise up against their Ottoman rulers. Indeed, the only time in history that they have acted aggressively was against the Jews.

Lord Balfour reminded the Arabs that nation states were about to be created for them in Transjordan and Iraq. He remarked: “I hope that, remembering all that, that they will not grudge that small notch – for it is no more geographically, whatever it may be historically – that small notch in what are now Arab territories being given to the people who have for all these hundreds of years been separated from it but surely have a title to develop on their own lines in the land of their forefathers.”

He was wrong, however, since Palestine was not an Arab territory in any legal sense, as it had passed from the Ottomans, who held it since 1517, to the League of Nations in 1920. Three centuries is long enough to establish legal title. He also was not correct in saying that, for centuries, the Jews had been separated from Palestine, because Jews had lived there in varying numbers and in different places continuously throughout the entire period. The Jewish claim to the Land of Israel [Palestine] was actually stronger than that of the Arabs. It was even stronger than Lord Balfour’s assertion.

At present, Tobias Elwood, a British Foreign Office official, has absurdly tried to rewrite the Declaration according to current sensibilities. He contends that Lord Balfour should have inserted a reference to Palestinian “political” rights alongside the civil and religious rights that modern Israel recognizes, far better than any surrounding Arab state does for any non-Arab or non-Muslim community. Yet there was no such entity called Palestine on any Ottoman administrative or political map and there as was no distinct Palestinian national identity at the time of the Balfour Declaration. Therefore, Mr. Elwood’s attempts are intellectual and historical nonsense and gratuitously offensive to the State of Israel in this the centenary year of the Declaration.

In his evidence to the Palestine Royal Commission chaired by Lord Peel in March 1937, Winston Churchill, – who was responsible for establishing Transjordan and Iraq after the Cairo Conference in 1921, – emphatically stated that back in 1917, “the conception undoubtedly was that, if the absorptive capacity over a number of years and the breeding over a number of years, all guided by the British Government, gave an increasing Jewish population, that population should not in any way be restricted from reaching a majority position. Certainly not. On the contrary, I think in the main that would be the spirit of the Balfour Declaration. As to what arrangement would be made to safeguard the rights of the new minority, that obviously remains open, but certainly we committed ourselves to the idea that someday, somehow, far off in the future, subject to justice and economic convenience, there might well be a great Jewish State there, numbered by millions, far exceeding the present inhabitants of the country, and to cut them off from that would be a wrong.”

Churchill went on: “Naturally all the Jews in the world would not go and live there, but if it is a centre which will attract Jews from outside and if the attraction can be kept within the limits of the economic absorptive capacity … there are no limits assigned at all. If more Jews rally to this Home, the Home will become all Palestine eventually, provided that at each stage there is no harsh injustice done to the other residents. Why is there harsh injustice done if people come in and make a livelihood for more and make the desert into palm groves and orange groves? Why is it injustice because there is more work and wealth for everybody? There is no injustice. The injustice is when those who live in the country leave it to be a desert for thousands of years.”

When one of the Commission members, Sir Horace Rumbold, called the Jews a foreign race to Palestine, Churchill retorted: “A foreign race? Not at all. … In the time of Christ the population of Palestine was much greater, when it was a Roman province. When the Mohammedan upset occurred in world history and the great hordes of Islam swept over these places, they broke it all up, smashed it all up. You have seen the terraces on the hills which used to be cultivated, which under Arab rule have remained a desert. I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a long time. I do not admit that right.”

Churchill ultimately asserted the right of Jews to a National Home in Palestine to something even more politically incorrect than Tobias Ellwood could ever imagine – the right of conquest. As he told the Peel Commission: “These Arabs were a poor people, conquered, living under the Turks fairly well … They lived fairly easily in a flat squalor typical of pre-war Turkish Empire provinces, and then when the war came they became our enemies and they filled the armies against us and fired their rifles and shot our men. … But our armies advanced and they were conquered. It is not a question of a slow creeping conquest. They were beaten then and at our disposition. Mercy may impose many restraints. The question is how you give back to them in accordance with the new facts which have emerged in the great struggle some of the positions which they held. They were defeated in the open field. It is not a question of creeping conquest. They were beaten out of the place. Not a dog could bark. And then we decided in the process of the conquest of these people to make certain pledges to the Jews.” (Sir Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume, V, Part III, The Coming of War 1936-1939, p. 605.)

Now, contrast that Turkish military service undertaken by the Palestinian Arabs to the work that Chaim Weizmann did for the British Admiralty in his role as a scientific advisor during the First World War. The Weizmann Process for making the acetone so vital for munitions production was described by Lloyd George as having been of great importance to the British war effort. So when, on June 13, 1917, Weizmann emphasized to Balfour the importance of having a strategic friend so close to the Suez Canal – Britain’s lifeline to her Indian Empire – he was talking to someone who was already grateful for his support, and thus lent a willing ear. Supporting friends who help you over enemies who oppose you was something that Western powers used to do in those days.

However unpalatable it may be to modern sensibilities, it is the same right of conquest that allowed the Ottomans to rule over the Holy Land for three centuries and the Americans to rule over the central part of their continent for two. The Russians have ruled in Moscow since the Muscovites turned back the Tartars. Christians rule in Spain today because the Muslims were cleared out in the late Fifteenth Century and Austrians rule in Vienna today because Muslims were turned back from the city in 1683. In the mid-Twentieth Century, the eastern borders of Poland were moved 200 miles to the west because of Russia’s victory over Germany. There are dozens of other examples globally, and many, even more recently. History’s losers might not like it, but eventually all of them have come to lump it, all except the Palestinian Arabs, who have been encouraged by the UN, the EU, the Foreign Office, the Arab League and their own myopic leaders that there can somehow be a fundamental revision to this right of conquest, even after seventy years of the State of Israel and now 100 years since the Balfour Declaration.

Lloyd George claimed to know the story of the Jewish people as well or better than that of his native Welsh. “When Dr. Weizmann was talking of Palestine,” he wrote, “he kept bringing up place names which were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.” The role of Chaim Weizmann was central to Balfour’s understanding that nowhere but Palestine would do as a National Home for the Jews, and of course the work done by Theodore Herzl and the Zionist movement must never be underestimated. But ultimately the Balfour Declaration has a complex multi-causal explanation, coming about as the result of an historically unique set of personal, political and geostrategic circumstances which in their linkage and almost perfect timing almost defy belief. Indeed some see it as a cause for belief. But however you see it, ultimately it cannot be separated from the idealism of Arthur Balfour himself, and his belief that “the case of the Jews is absolutely exceptional, and must be treated by exceptional methods.”

At the end of his life, Arthur Balfour told his niece, Lady Rayleigh, that the Declaration was the thing that he had done in a long career of public service that made him most proud. I think, looking at what it has led to after 100 years that we can all agree with him.