The Hidden Hand of the Rothschild Banking Family | Robert Sepehr
The Balfour Declaration
The Hidden Hand – Robert Sepehr – 14 Sep 2016 | Robert Sepehr
The Rothschild family is a wealthy family descending from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a court Jew to the German Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel, in the Free City of Frankfurt, who established his banking business in the 1760s.
The Balfour Declaration was a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom‘s Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. It read:
“His Majesty’s government view with favors the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors 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.”
The text of the letter was published in the press one week later, on 9 November 1917. The “Balfour Declaration” was later incorporated into both the Sèvres peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire, and the Mandate for Palestine. The original document is kept at the British Library.
The full text of the Balfour Declaration is as follows:
“Foreign Office
November 2nd, 1917Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:
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.
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur James Balfour”
Illegitimate Mandate
The Balfour Declaration was controversial and contested, as it promised Jews a land where the natives made up more than 90 percent of the population, and it was one of three conflicting wartime promises made by the British. The British had no right to determine the future of Palestine, but the League of Nations gave the Balfour Declaration international legitimacy when it was incorporated in the Mandate for Palestine, which specifically referred to the historical connections of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the moral validity of reconstituting their National Home in that country.
Impact
The Balfour Declaration had a significant impact on the lives of Palestinians. The declaration turned the Zionist aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine into a reality when Britain publicly pledged to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” there. The pledge is generally viewed as one of the main catalysts of the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 – and the conflict that ensued with the Zionist state of Israel. The Balfour Declaration is widely seen as the precursor to the 1948 Palestinian Nakba when Zionist armed groups, who were trained by the British, forcibly expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. Despite some opposition within the War Cabinet predicting that such an outcome was probable, the British government still chose to issue the declaration. The Balfour Declaration is regarded as one of the most controversial and contested documents in the modern history of the Arab world and has puzzled historians for decades. The declaration engendered anger towards Britain throughout the Arab world and at all levels of Arab society from the intellectual elites to the masses. The consequences of the Balfour Declaration were not confined to Palestine. It became a central point of reference for Arab intellectuals after the First World War. By the end of the Mandate, there was no gratitude and no goodwill left towards Britain on either side of the Arab–Jewish divide. The Balfour Declaration is considered a principal cause of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict, often described as the world’s most intractable conflict. The Balfour Declaration limited the rights of the indigenous Palestinian population to civil and religious rights, infringing on the principle of self-determination. The Balfour Declaration is regarded as a catastrophe for the Palestinians and has had long-lasting consequences.
Source: The Hidden Hand – ROBERT SEPEHR
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