Just Lie Back & Think of Britain

Times' columnist Ben Macintyre's Britain's Middle East carve-up is no cause for shame (published in The Australian on July 30) is, as the title suggests, an apologia for British imperialism.* Here are the opening paragraphs:

"Boris Johnson is more a historian than a diplomat... The new British foreign secretary has written books on Churchill and London... He is undoubtedly comfortable in the past. This is just as well because one of the first challenges will be to negotiate his way through exceptionally controversial anniversaries of events in Britain's history that have a continuing impact on the present: the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, which promised a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, falls in November next year; 100 years ago this year, British and French diplomats signed the Sykes-Picot agreement that secretly divided up the Middle East between them; October sees the 60th anniversary of the Suez Crisis, the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in collusion with Israel.

[**The wording of the declaration is actually "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."]

"These events may have lost much of their relevance in western memory but in the Middle East they remain freighted with significance, resentment and pain. The centenary of the First World War has been comparatively plain sailing in commemorative terms but Britain's Middle East diplomacy surrounding that conflict, which paved the way for the foundation of Israel and Arab nation states, is a diplomatic minefield. The letter written by foreign secretary Arthur Balfour in November 1917 pledged British support for a 'national home' for the Jewish people, leading to the Mandate, mass Jewish immigration and the creation of Israel after World War II."

Notice what's missing?

All mention of the 1915 Anglo-Arab treaty negotiated between Britain's high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, and the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, which preceded both the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) and the Balfour Declaration (1917), and without knowledge of which the treachery of those two astonishing manoeuvres cannot be fully appreciated.

Whether this is a deliberate omission or a case of ignorance is anyone's guess. In either case, Macintyre's subsequent thesis - partly unveiled in the title of his piece - which I will discuss shortly, is massively flawed. The simple fact is that, in 1915, the British promised the leader of the Arab nationalist movement, Sharif Hussein, an independent Arab state comprising most of today's Arab world (reserving only the northern coastline of Greater Syria) in exchange for an alliance against the Turks, a pact which the Arabs entered into in good faith, and on the basis of which they launched the Arab Revolt against the Turks, but which the British betrayed twice over, first with the French, then with the nascent Zionist movement.**

It should further be noted that, with respect to the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, as it became known, the British even went so far as to suppress all knowledge of its existence, and, when this did not succeed, blatantly attempted to misrepresent its terms. It is therefore only when the British promise of Arab independence is factored into any analysis of these matters that Britain's treachery becomes fully apparent. In any case, with or without the McMahon treaty, Britain had no right to gift Arab lands to others.

Macintyre continues:

"This week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas raised the prospect of legal action against Britain over the declaration. His spokesman insisted that as a result of Britain's 'ill-omened promise, hundreds of thousands of Jews were moved from Europe and elsewhere to Palestine at the expense of our Palestinian people whose parents and grandparents had lived for thousands of years on the soil of their homeland.' Although Israel is gearing up for a Balfour party, the Foreign Office has spoken merely of 'marking' the centenary, rather than lauding it, a cautious position that will displease both sides..."

Which brings us to Macintyre's thesis, which is essentially that the declaration was born of wartime desperation, and hence "no cause for shame."

The centenary of the declaration, he contends, should be "neither eulogised nor bemoaned but dispassionately explored, analysed and understood, a fraught moment in history whose consequences could not have been foreseen at the time. The declaration was prompted by various factors including a genuine desire on the part of the British government to create a Jewish homeland as well as geopolitical interests. Britain was locked in a desperate war with no certainty of victory, Jews had been prominent in the Bolshevik Revolution and it was hoped the statement might encourage Russia to maintain the battle on the Eastern Front. Britain's support for a Jewish homeland might undermine German-Jewish support for the war, it was thought, while encouraging increased financial contributions to the war effort from the American-Jewish community. At a war cabinet meeting in October 1917, Balfour bluntly observed a statement supporting Zionism would be 'extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America'."

The first matter of note here is Macintyre's bald assertion that the "consequences" of flooding an Arab land with European Jews, "could not have been foreseen at the time." It's as though he's never heard of Ireland, let alone the plantation of Ulster.

The second is that an uninformed reader might conclude from Macintyre's piece that the declaration was an all-British cabinet affair. There is no sign in his account of the Russian-Jewish leaders of the Zionist movement in Britain - Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolov - having been involved in the urging and drafting of the declaration. This is another huge omission. The fact is that without constant Zionist pressure, influence-peddling and propaganda such a declaration would never have eventuated. One need only ask where Balfour and Prime Minister Lloyd George got the patently false idea that a declaration in support of the Zionists would have Jewish communities in Russia, Germany and the United States working their supposed influence on the Allies' behalf, and hence making a real, material difference to the war's outcome.

The third is that nowhere in the declaration is there any indication of support for a Jewish state as such.

Macintyre continues:

"Crucially the declaration also states that 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine' - which then made up 90% of the population. Any 'marking' of the centenary needs to acknowledge that while the Jewish homeland envisaged in 1917 has been realised, the promise to protect the rights of the Palestinian people has not been honoured."

While Macintyre correctly highlights the fact that Palestine's population at the time was overwhelmingly non-Jewish, he neglects to mention that that this overwhelming majority was deliberately written off as "existing non-Jewish communities," with no political rights whatever. Colonialism doesn't get much more outrageous than that, Yet here he  is warning against using the centenary as "an excuse for political grandstanding," which "will only inflame the situation in the Middle East."

IOW, everyone just lie back and think of what poor old Britain was going through at the time! And Palestinians, whatever you do (and, more importantly, wherever you are) NO GRANDSTANDING next year, OK?

[**Ironically, Macintyre is the author of A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby & the Great Betrayal (2014).]

Slip, Slop, Slap Journalism

Read this:

"Otto Skorzeny was a diehard Nazi: an expert in special operations nicknamed 'Hitler's commando' who rescued Mussolini from Italian partisans, ensured the murder of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews and departed to eternal damnation with a posse of elderly Nazis making the fascist salute over his grave. This week, it was revealed that Skorzeny had also been a Mossad hitman, contracted after the war to kill another ex-Nazi who was helping Egypt develop a strategic missile program." (To catch the devil from the shadows, you need to recruit his disciples, Ben Macintyre, The Times/The Australian, 2/4/16)

Now watch as Macintyre goes on to slip, slop, slap a few coats of whitewash on Mossad: 

"Mossad, probably the world's least sentimental secret service, was merely demonstrating a reality of the seamier side of intelligence work: to catch the devil, you sometimes had to recruit his disciples."

"... this uncomfortable accommodation with evil..."

"The balance between utility and morality, between extracting value and maintaining ethical values..."

Bloody hilarious...

OK, Ben, OK, enough already, I get it!

Mossad's the most ethical intelligence agency in the world, and the IDF is the world's most moral army, and Israel's the only democracy in the Middle East, if not the world, and Israel's a bastion of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism, and...

Granny Watch

The following letter from dear old Mary Werther of "Armadale, Vic" in yesterday's Australian is polished and, on the surface, persuasive, just the kind you'd expect from a resident matron of that up-market, leafy Melbourne suburb. And it's sure to have worked a treat on readers who either haven't read the article referred to or are blissfully ignorant, by choice or no, of one simple inconvenient fact... but I'll come to that later. First to Mary's letter:

"Lavinia Moore's letter (29/11) and the article by John Lyons in The Weekend Australian Magazine (Stone cold justice, 26-27/11) both raise the difficult issue of how to treat Palestinian teenage combatants who attack Israeli civilians with rocks thrown at cars, aiming to cause severe injury and murder, such as the recent deaths of an Israeli father and his infant son.

"These children are effectively used as frontline soldiers and brainwashed to extreme hatred and violence by their parents to further their political agenda.

"Should they simply be allowed to kill Israeli civilians without any recourse in the courts?

"In practice, while no one likes arresting under-age youths, least of all the Israelis, they are usually held only briefly as a disincentive to others to emulate their actions.

"Unsubstantied allegations of any mistreatment are usually trumped-up propaganda for Western ears. They may indeed be frightened by their capture and courtroom trial, but is that worse than the pain they inflict?

"In Lyons's article, the mothers are so sympathetically portrayed, weeping in the court-room. Perhaps it is they, and the fathers, who should be held accountable for inciting their teenage sons to conduct murderous attacks."

Mmm... how smooth and plausible is that? Why, it almost comes with a cup of tea and a bagel on a silver platter!

It's as though Mary's writing about teenage toughs come from distant Kensington to rock the good folk of Armadale. You just wouldn't know from her account that, unlike my imagined gang from Kensington, these young Palestinian stonethrowers were born into, and educated by, a decades-long, brutal Israeli occupation which sets the scene for acts of resistance, however futile, by its victims. A comparable scenario might be one where the good folk of Armadale invade, occupy, colonise, patrol and shoot up the residents - or should that be denizens, Mary? - of Kensington and get all shirty when the Kensingtonians start reaching for the rocks. Ah, but pigs will fly before you'll get an acknowledment from Mary of an Israeli occupation engendering a Palestinian resistance. Certainly not when she's just put her hand up for the vice-presidency of the newly-formed Australian Voices for Israel, a fact that the old dear apparently forgot to append to her letter. (See Two new groups get behind Israel, jwire.com.au, 2/9/11).

Now I know she's a busy girl, but what, I wonder, would Mary have made of the opinion piece by Times' journalist Ben MacIntyre, Moral issues give rise to revolution, published in the exact same edition of The Australian that carried her letter? MacIntyre broaches the concept of resistance to oppression in the context of the so-called Arab Spring, beginning:

"You are a Syrian soldier watching, with mounting uncertainty, as the revolution builds. Do you slip away in the night to join the Free Syria Army? Do you follow your commanding officer if he defects to the rebels, or stay put? Do you wait and watch, or take the plunge?"

Now if MacIntyre had been writing instead about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, he could well have begun thus: 'You are a Palestinian teenager watching, with mounting anger, as the occupation takes its toll on your family, your community, your people. Do you pick up a stone and throw it at the Israeli settlers who relentlessly colonise your land or the marauding troops who aid and abett them? Or do you repress your feelings and tuck your tail between your legs. Do you wait and watch, or take the plunge?'

You just know Mary's response to that one, don't you?

MacIntyre goes on to remind his English readers: "In Britain, we are particularly susceptible to the myth that Britons never, never, never shall be slaves. We hear tales of collaboration in Nazi-occupied Europe and believe that the British would have held out, resisted, fought back if the Germans had invaded. But resisting a well-organised despotism, ruthlessly enforced, is astonishingly difficult, demanding a level of courage that few know they possess until tested. 'What would you do?' This remains the central conundrum of every war, revolution or resistance movement."

What would you do? I can just imagine Mary's response: 'About what?'

MacIntyre quotes Anthony Eden's words "when asked whether Britain would have behaved differently from France under Nazi dictatorship: 'It would be impertinent for any country that has not suffered occupation to pass judgment on one that did'."

Or, one might add, for an individual from an up-market, leafy Melbourne suburb to pass judgment on any Palestinians.

Now I indicated earlier that Mary's letter would have gone down well with those who hadn't read Australian Middle East correspondent John Lyons' revealing piece, Stone cold justice. Anyone who had, however, would have noticed just how wondefully artful the old dear's letter is:

While Lyons refers matter-of-factly to children, Mary has them pegged as "combatants" and "frontline soldiers," bent on bloody murder. And while it's clear from Lyon's expose that the targets of the stone throwers are largely marauding Israeli troops, Mary's exclusive focus is "Israeli civilians."

While Lyons writes of near 100% conviction rates, sentences ranging from 2 weeks to 10 months, confessions (in Hebrew!), handcuffing, blindfolding, manhandling, placing boots on necks, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, threats of rape, molestation by dogs, beatings, and solitary confinement, Mary reassures us that "while no one likes arresting under-age youths, least of all the Israelis, they are usually held only briefly as a disincentive to others to emulate their actions," and is adamant that "[u]nsubstantiated allegations of any mistreatment are usually trumped-up propaganda for Western ears."

Least of all the Israelis?!!!

Forget the kids from Kensington - it's the little old ladies from well-to-do, leafy suburbs you've got to watch out for.