Jacob Rothschild died the other day, but not before leaving us with his view of the creation of the modern state of Israel, in an interview with Daniel Taub, the former Israeli ambassador to the UK:
I've genuinely felt it's one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of the Jewish people.
If you think it took 3,000 years to get to this.
And then you say, how did this miracle happen?
It's the most incredible piece of opportunism.
I mean, if you think, you had an impoverished would-be scientist, Haim Weizmann, who somehow gets to England.
Meets a few people, including members of my family, seduces them.
He has such great charm and conviction.
He gets to Balfour and he unbelievably persuades Balfour and Lloyd George, the prime minister, and most of the ministers, that this idea of the national home for Jews should be allowed to take place.
I mean, it's so, so unlikely.
And then he starts to fight a difficult battle with the British cabinet, and this letter goes through five drafts, as you know,
And in the end it comes out as a rather compromising letter.
I mean the essential point is there for the Jewish community to fasten onto.
You have the first bit which promises a national home rather than the national home and then you have the bit that nothing that's to be done should in any way harm the Arab community.
But you come back to the big point which is that this is perhaps the greatest event in Jewish life for thousands of years and it's a miracle.
“not explicable by natural of scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency”.
You could see it that way.
Or, you could consider that it was the result of other factors; here’s a few:
The British power elites thought they could reward wealthy Jews for financial help in fighting the First World War.
Hubris by empire-minded social engineers who believed that displacing hundreds of thousands of people was a good idea (particularly in the hot spot of the Middle East, with its 3,000+ year history of religious wars).
And then, by the time the UN got involved, there was all that Holocaust guilt. European Jewish refugees were turned away by the so-called “Christian” and “freedom-loving” West when help was needed most.
Americans wanted a strategic ally in the Middle East. They could have easily housed all the Jews in the “land of the free”, which had a constitution to protect them like no other country on earth; but they preferred to use them like pawns.
And there was, of course, some nutty folk who wanted to bring on the Second Coming by the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. These are the Christian Zionists who claim to be friends of the Jews.
Ignoring the secular Jews, like Einstein, who warned of Zionism in the modern state of Israel
And, last but not least, ignoring the hundreds of thousands of Arabs living in Palestine who didn’t like being kicked out of their homes.
Of course, that decision was made. There’s no turning back the clock. Now the nations that were involved in that fateful decision must ensure that their decision did not lead to genocide. Unfortunately, the people are allowing their politicians to play their sick geopolitical games and profit from the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians. And unfortunately, for the Jewish people wanting to live peacefully everywhere else in the world, the genocidal activity in Gaza will only escalate hatred. Again, the ordinary people suffer as the power elites prosper.
Further reading:
Few among the general public know that Jews were only a few percent of the population of the area now controlled by Israel for centuries and into the late 1800s. A lot of people incorrectly assume that the land now controlled by Israel has always had a large Jewish population, which is not the case. The history there is similar to what happened in what is now the U.S. and Northern Ireland. Foreigners show up to a land uninvited by the native population and kill/subdue the native population and take over the place for themselves.