Plan to conquer Gaza has been long in the making

THE Israeli plan to conquer Gaza got its legal base when Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, promising Palestine to the Zionists as a homeland for Jews.

- DR. E. ROSS

This was more than two decades before WW2.

Albert Schneer devoted about half of his scholarly work, “The Balfour Declaration. The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict”, 2011, to the intricate web of negotiations that made it possible, drawing on information from Zionist and British archives.

The Balfour Declaration reads as follows: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

In other words, Britain pledged support for the aims of the Zionist movement of Jewish statehood and sovereignty, and not for the indigenous, existing majority.

In clear racist fashion, the Arab majority were mentioned in terms of what they were not, namely “non-Jewish”. (Like our Apartheid here, who described everyone who was not clearly of European descent, as “non-white”.)

And the rights for the Arabs were not political, nor national.

Although Britain tried to keep the Balfour under wraps by British censorship, the information did filter through by newspapers from Egypt.

In other words, the British didn’t even have the courage to share the information widely to Palestinians.