pumpkinstrokemarrow

He must have been a very able person to have lifted himself out from the depths of the Pripet Marshes, where it seems that in his youth, some people still went about in dug out canoes, to the eminence he became. A Zionist from the cradle.

It seems that back in the 19th century it was the ambition of some Jews to go to Palestine to die, rather than to live. Going there to live was a new ambition. Weizmann claims that Zionism was not born of or driven by the treatment of the Jews by the Russians but I do not buy this. Zionism might always have been there as a dream, but the dream would have never acquired power without the Russians.

In an interesting twist, it turns out that the neutralising clause in the Balfour Declaration, mentioned in the last post, was as much the result of bitter feuding within the English community, between the Zionists and the Assimilationists, as of any concern for the Arabs. Assimilationists being much more interested in building the good life in England that trolling off to build a new life in the desert. I guess, at this time, empire was still OK and there was nothing particularly wrong with the Jews seeking to colonise a chunk of the Middle East. After all, it was not many years since Europe had finished grabbing North Africa. We even offered them a chunk of Uganda as an alternative at one point. Then a very barren and very small chunk of Palestine. But the Zionists held out for Zion - and were not pleased when this was defined to exclude the lands to the east of the Jordan river, then called TransJordan.

His memoir says much about the need to build up the Jewish population in Palestine to the point where it was the majority and pays scant attention to the needs or rights of the Arabs who were already there - but there is some attention. To the point that, it seems that in 1918, shortly before the end of the first war, he struck a deal with Emir Faisal, the chap to whom Lawrence of Arabia reported, along the lines that there was plenty of room in the then rather empty, poor and barren Palestine for both peoples and that a partnership would be to the greater good of all. Both had plenty to offer. Faisal, although born in what is now western Saudi Arabia, had ambitions to lead a pan-Arab state centred on Damascus, including as well as western Saudi Arabia much of what is now Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel. At this point, things looked quite hopeful, but they were certainly scuppered by the time that Faisal was packed off to be king of what is now Iraq as part of some shabby deal between the English and the French.

To our credit, we had tried to broker a deal. But, sadly, we were too concerned with our own power and place in the region for this to work. East of Suez was, at the time, important for us.