Tag: Israel

The Balfour Declaration: what’s been forgotten

On By Martin Kramer

This year is the centennial of the Balfour Declaration, the decision of the British government announced on November 2, 1917, in favor of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration is the beginning of the international legitimation of the Zionist project and, ultimately, the State of Israel. That’s why British prime minister Theresa May has invited Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to London in November to mark the centennial. That’s also why the declaration is the target of Israel’s opponents, who cast it as a self-dealing grab by a perfidious empire. To the Arabs, it occupies the same circle of hell as the Sykes-Picot agreement.

Is this an accurate representation of the Balfour Declaration? If you deemed it an exclusively British project, you might think so. But what if it wasn’t? What if it represented the considered consensus of all the Allied powers at the time? What if Britain had insisted that the Zionists secure the buy-in of France, Italy, the United States, and even the Vatican before it issued the declaration? What if the Balfour Declaration was in fact an Allied declaration, the equivalent to a U.N. Security Council resolution today?

In the June monthly essay in the on-line Mosaic Magazine, I consider just that possibility, by a shift of focus. This isn’t the well-known story of Chaim Weizmann’s charm offensive among British decision-makers. It’s a lesser-known story, revolving around a forgotten Zionist leader (hint: he’s in the postcard below), and exploring many other assurances made in Paris, Rome and Washington, without which Britain wouldn’t have issued any declaration at all.

“The Forgotten Truth about the Balfour Declaration,” in Mosaic Magazine, at this link. It’s the monthly essay, so it will be followed each week by a response from another authority on the subject, and then by my own final word.

Seated right to left, Nahum Sokolow, Lord Balfour, Chaim and Vera Weizmann, in Rishon LeZion, 1925.

British passport

Israel, American Jews, and the gap

On By Martin Kramer

Moment Magazine runs a symposium in its November-December issue on “The Growing Gap Between Israel and American Jews.” Contributors include Elliott Abrams, Daniel Gordis, Yossi Klein Halevi, Aaron David Miller, Jonathan Sarna, Anita Shapira, Abe Sofaer, Dov Zakheim, and more. Here is my contribution.

It would be difficult to find two halves of one people who inhabit such totally different worlds. The blue-state suburbs of America, where most American Jews reside, are the most stable, secure and peaceful abodes known to humankind since the Garden of Eden (in one word: ever). In most of these places, no soldier has fired a shot in more than a century. American Jews are a minority of just under two percent of the population in an open society that embraces them. Having let their guard down, they’re being assimilated away.

Israeli Jews are just under two percent of the population of the Arab world, which adamantly refuses to “normalize” them in any way. They are subjected to barrages of threats in a region where people fulfill threats of violence every day. Arabs can be ruthless to one another: The death toll in nearby Iraq and Syria since 2003 is about equal to the massive death toll of the American Civil War. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what would happen to Israel’s Jews were they to let their guard down. Is it any wonder, then, that American Jews and Israelis see the world differently?

Yet despite the perils, Israeli Jewry is thriving. When Israel was born, there were nine American Jews to every Israeli Jew. Now they are at parity, and the long-term trend is clear: Israel is destined to become the center of the Jewish world. Sovereignty is such a powerful elixir that Jews who enjoy it thrive even in the most troubled part of the world. In less than a century, the center of world Jewry will have moved from Europe to America, then from America to Israel. Alas, some American Jews are experiencing this as a loss. The negation of Israel is one (minority) response among those who can’t grasp the dilemmas of sovereignty in an often anarchic world. But the majority of American Jews are driven by a sincere desire to help Israel prosper. Where their expectations aren’t realistic, Israel must work to change them. But it must never ignore them, lest the Jews cease to be a people.

Israel and the Post-American Middle East

On By Martin Kramer
Foreign Affairs

Was the feud between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, first over settlements and then over Iran, a watershed? Netanyahu, it is claimed, turned U.S. support of Israel into a partisan issue. Liberals, including many American Jews, are said to be fed up with Israel’s “occupation,” which will mark its 50th anniversary next year. The weakening of Israel’s democratic ethos is supposedly undercutting the “shared values” argument for the relationship. Some say Israel’s dogged adherence to an “unsus­tainable” status quo in the West Bank has made it a liability in a region in the throes of change. Israel, it is claimed, is slipping into pariah status, imposed by the global movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).

Biblical-style lamentations over Israel’s final corruption have been a staple of the state’s critics and die-hard anti-Zionists for 70 years. Never have they been so detached from reality. Of course, Israel has changed—decidedly for the better….

Read the rest here.