Neither Balfour nor Britain created Israel. The Jews did

Balfour has long been a hate figure for Palestine activists, and now that so many in the West are Palestine activists it should not surprise anyone that Balfour is hurtling towards national villain status. Andrew Slaughter, chair of the Commons justice committee, recently placed the Balfour Declaration within “the UK’s long history of fomenting problems in the Middle East”. Police decided to take no further action after a vandal slashed Balfour’s portrait in Trinity College.

Also last year, the Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy cited Balfour as proof of a “long-standing British policy to displace Palestinians from their homes”. In 2017, the centenary year of the declaration, then shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry said: “I don’t think we celebrate the Balfour declaration, but I think we have to mark it because it was a turning point in the history of that area and the most important way of marking it is to recognise Palestine.”

Balfour guilt has political elites donning their sackcloths and ashes but we would all benefit from regaining a little perspective. Britain did not create the Israel, neither through Balfour nor its administration of Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. Jews created Israel. The Old Yishuv. The early Jewish immigrants from central and eastern Europe. Mizrahi Jews, many driven out of Arab and Muslim lands in which their families had lived for generations. (This is the Nakba people don’t talk about.) Jewish sovereignty was fought and paid and planted and prayed and all too often bled for. It was not a gift, but a reclamation.

The UK had a role, no doubt about that. For all the tensions between the Brits and the Zionists, the arrests and floggings and hangings of Jewish freedom fighters and the Irgun’s and Lehi’s bloody reprisals at the King David Hotel and in the eucalyptus groves of Even Yehuda, the British Army kept enough order to prevent the Arabs of the Palestine territory and surrounding countries from slaughtering the Jews en masse. Orde Wingate trained the Haganah in self-defence and British mahalniks like Tom Derek Bowden flocked to Israel in 1948 when the Arabs tried to exterminate the nascent Jewish state.

But the Britain that issued the Balfour declaration was the same Britain that four years later severed almost 80 per cent of Palestine and handed it to the Hashemites for an Arab state, which is now Jordan. This is why, today, Israel is only a narrow strip and, if the world gets its way, will become narrower still. It was also the British who drastically restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine during the Holocaust, an effective death warrant for desperate European Jews.

If Britain should apologise for anything, it is for the failure of successive governments to live up to the three promises contained in the Balfour Declaration.The first, to “use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of” a Jewish national home in Palestine, was betrayed by the Transjordan separation and is betrayed even now, as British ministers affirm Israel’s right to self-defence from one corner of their mouths while sanctioning it for doing so from the other.

The second promise, that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, is often raised by Palestine activists and other anti-Zionists. While Israel’s management of religious and ethnic differences is as imperfect as any country’s, non-Jews enjoy legal equality and guaranteed rights. For the absence of self-determination for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, the Israelis must take their share of the blame, but it is a share no bigger than that of the Palestinians themselves.

The third promise, the one everyone forgets about, was that “the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country” would not be adversely affected. Yet Britain has watched as ancient Jewish civilisations have been all but erased in countries like Iraq, Egypt and Morocco, and closer to home it is failing to deter antisemitism in UK institutions and at street level.

When the Telegraph interviewer put to him that Jews needed a homeland, Charles Dance replied: “It’s all very complicated.” Conscience is a fickle fellow indeed. Dance can rest assured that his conscience is clear. The Balfour Declaration did not create Israel and the Britain that produced Balfour no longer exists.

Shorn of our empire, our defences depleted by elite preferences for much-hailed but seldom-seen soft power, we are now a mid-level power at best. We can no more “unpick” the 1917 declaration or redraw the Middle East map than we can rule India or pack off convicts to New South Wales. A Foreign Office statement today carries less weight than the paper it is printed on. Such are the wages of an empire’s death.

Without realising it, progressives like Dance are hankering for a new imperialism, an enlightened imperialism, in which the solution to the Middle East crisis resides in London or some other European capital. If only the government would denounce Israel more, sanction Israel more, betray Israel more, Britain’s recalcitrant child would finally fall into line. Only Israel isn’t our child, she is a sovereign and independent nation and will remain so for as long as her people are willing to fight for her.

We are no longer in the business of nation-making. We can barely keep our own nation together. The past can be celebrated or lamented, critiqued and revised, but it cannot be undone. The Jewish people built their own state, but the Balfour Declaration will remain a record of a gone-forever moment when Britain’s word carried moral weight throughout the world.