Go See Dr Weizmann!

"'If by Zionist you mean that the Jews have the right to a homeland in Israel and the right to a country then I am a Zionist,' the Tory leader [David Cameron] said, adding that support for Israel is 'in the DNA' of members of his party." (Tory leader calls himself 'Zionist'; UK Jews campaign against boycott, Assaf Uni, Haaretz, 13/6/07)

Earlier this month, Little Britain's leader addressed the UK's United Jewish Appeal (UJA). Nothing out of the ordinary mind you, just the usual inauthentic channelling exercise you'd expect from a US puppet at a Zionist gig: first Netanyahu - "Iran is not just a threat to Israel. It is a threat to the world" - then Obama - "[N]othing is off the table."

What about the days of yore, I thought, when Britannia ruled not only the waves but also Palestine? Was there to be in Cameron's speech to the UJA no hint of the glory days when His Majesty's Government, not Obama or Netanyahu, called the shots?

Well, yes there was actually. It was when Cameron began lecturing the Palestinians that I first sensed a stir in his primordial Zionist DNA and caught, for the first time, a distant echo of a British, as opposed to an American or Israeli, voice. This is what he said:

"[L]et me tell President Abbas* something very clearly: there is no path to statehood except through talks with Israel. So if the Palestinian plan is simply posturing with the UN rather than negotiating with Israel, Britain will never support it. And let me say this to the Palestinians too. Britain will never support anyone who sponsors a football tournament named after a suicide bomber who killed 20 Israelis in a restaurant. We will not tolerate incitement to terrorism."

And then it hit me. That 'Go and talk to Israel' bit was all the proof I needed that here in 2012 David Cameron was channelling the Lord Balfour of 1921! (And how spooky are those numbers!) Allow me to explain:

It was in 1921 that a group of Palestinian leaders, in the form of a joint Muslim-Christian Palestinian delegation, set sail for London where, in the words of JMN Jeffries, who sympathetically chronicled their efforts, "[t]hey demanded the revocation of the Balfour Declaration, and supported this demand with reasoned statements and evidence presented to the Colonial Office." (Palestine: The Reality, 1939, p 458)

"The following month," continues Jeffries, "they went to Geneva for the meeting of the League [of Nations] Assembly, and here, as in London, their very presence and demeanour proved most awkward and annoying for the Government delegates. Balfour himself had gone to Geneva. During a five-weeks' stay the Arab delegates made many attempts to see him, but time and again were rebuffed with the insolent message, 'If it is anything to do with Palestine, Mr Balfour has already seen Dr Weizmann.'** The delegates preserved their tempers, which cannot have been easy, and continued to demand an interview, and to make known in the League corridors that they were determined upon one, till further refusal would have generated a scandal. So Balfour finally received them. But he sat wrapped in absence of mind and incomprehension and evasiveness, and all they could get from him concerning Palestine was a repeated, 'It is an experiment,' and the injunction to go and see Dr Weizmann. That interview was the only time the Arabs met their evil genius." (p 459)

Yet another indication, if needed, that the past is never truly past. Incredibly, no matter how diminished on the world stage, it seems that Britain, which incurred primary responsibility for the Palestine problem when it incorporated the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in its mandate for Palestine, still sees fit to dictate to the Palestinian people, almost 100 years after the event. If the Zionism of its ruling class is DNA deep, so too, it seems, is its capacity for colonial chutzpah.

[*There is no suggestion here that Abbas is in any way the equal of the worthies who made up the 1921 delegation. They would, of course, be turning in their graves at his recent statement to Israeli television that he has given up on his right to return and live in Safad, his 'Israeli' birthplace; **The British government's go-to Zionist supremo from 1917-1948.]