A Post-Balfour Post

The Balfour Declaration has come, and gone.

Now for a short post-Balfour observation.

The Declaration and Balfour personally were attacked, some starting about three years ago.  Haaretz was in the thick of it.  How dare the liberators of the Ottoman Empire do what they wished to do?  

No matter that the Arabs were engaged in the very same diplomacy maneuvering as the Zionists, McMahon-Hussein and Lawrence and all that.

You have this, too:

Lawrence guided the prince into the terrible error of signing a document that appeared to provide Arab support for a Jewish Palestine. Lawrence, an artisan of half-truths, likely provided purposefully misleading translations in the meetings held between Faisal and Chaim Weizmann, head of the British Zionist Federation and later first president of Israel, glossing over the (very substantial) differences between the two sides and staging a reconciliation between Arab and Zionist interests. At best, it was a clumsy attempt to save British honor from the awful embarrassment of its conflicting wartime commitments in the Hussein–McMahon Correspondence, which included Palestine in the Arab kingdom [really? the British Government have held that the intent of the McMahon Correspondence was not to promise Palestine to Hussein], and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

I'll make it short.

Were the Zionists all that bad in trying to regain the historic homeland?

Consider this:

anti-imperialists, such as Mohandas Gandhi and WEB Du Bois, vigorously supported the war aims of their white overlords, hoping to secure dignity for their compatriots in the aftermath.

Zionism equals Gandhi.

Consider that.

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