Churchill's Twisted, Colonial Logic

Further to my previous post on Churchill, I thought some of his other answers to questions put to him in March 1937 by the Peel commissioners might prove instructive.

Remember, as you read them, that the Palestinian Arabs - Muslims and Christians - constituted over 90% of Palestine's population when the Balfour Declaration, giving British backing to a Jewish National Home in Palestine, was issued in 1917, and that, despite the mass immigration of European Jews into Palestine from 1918 on, under the protection of British bayonets, they were still the overwhelming majority in their ancestral homeland in 1937.

Remember, also, that despite Britain's other myriad colonial crimes, stretching from the very beginnings of the empire 'upon which the sun never set and the blood never dried', no other colonised people that I am aware of were subjected to anything like the Kafkaesque nightmare of having their independence indefinitely postponed by a ruling colonial power with the express purpose that they would one day be superseded by another, 'superior' people, bent on the formation of an exclusive, ethnocratic, settler-colonial state.

Behold the Churchillian 'logic' behind this cruel experiment (or as one of the commissioners put it: 'a thing unheard of in history').

Q: What was the meaning and aim of the Jewish National Home?

A: The conception... was that, if the absorbtive capacity over a number of years and the breeding over a number of years... gave an increasing Jewish population, that population should not in any way be restricted from reaching a majority position.

Q: What arrangements would be made to safeguard the rights of the new minority - the Arabs?

A: That obviously remains open, but certainly we committed ourselves to the idea that some day... 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... We said there should be a Jewish Home in Palestine, but if more and more Jews gather to that Home and all is worked from age to age, from generation to generation, with justice and fair consideration to those displaced... certainly... it was intended that they might in the course of time become an overwhelmingly Jewish State.

Q: When you said [in your 1922 White Paper] that the Jewish National Home in Palestine... may become a centre in which the Jewish people may take a pride, what did you mean??

A: If more Jews rally to this Home, the Home will become all Palestine eventually, provided that at each stage there is no harsh justice done to the other residents.

Q: Would this not constitute an injustice to the Palestinian Arabs?

A: 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.*

Q: Isn't continuing Jewish immigration a creeping invasion and conquest of Palestine spread over half a century, which is a thing unheard of in history?

A: It is not a creeping invasion. In 1918 the Arabs were beaten and at our disposition. 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. Now the question is how to administer in a humane and enlightened fashion and certain facts have emerged.

I could go on, but I'm sure you've got the idea.

[*Shades of Tony Abbott's words of 15/11/14: "As we look around this glorious city, as we see the extraordinary development, it's hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush."]