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<h1 id="reader-title">The racist worldview of Arthur Balfour</h1>
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<p class="node__submitted"> <span class="field
field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/david-cronin">David
Cronin</a></span> <span class="field field-blog">- </span><span
class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single"
content="2017-10-18T07:05:18+00:00">18 October 2017</span></span>
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<p><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/arthur-james-balfour">Arthur
James Balfour</a> will, no doubt, be praised
effusively by supporters of Israel in the coming weeks
for a brief document he signed 100 years ago.</p>
<p>As Britain’s foreign secretary in November 1917,
Balfour declared his backing to the Zionist
colonization project. Through his <a
href="http://www.balfourproject.org/the-balfour-declaration/">declaration</a>,
Britain became the imperial sponsor of a Jewish state
– euphemistically called a “Jewish national home” –
that would be established in Palestine by expelling
its indigenous people en masse.</p>
<p>An assurance in that document about protecting
Palestinian rights proved worthless. Balfour himself
was quite happy to negate that assurance.</p>
<p>In 1919, he <a
href="http://www.balfourproject.org/a-few-quotes/">argued</a>
that Zionist aspirations were “of far profounder
import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000
Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”</p>
<p>Rather than being marked “with pride,” as <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/theresa-may">Theresa
May</a>, the current British prime minister, has <a
href="https://cfoi.co.uk/prime-minister-theresa-may-vows-to-mark-balfour-declaration-centenary-with-pride-at-cfis-biggest-ever-annual-business-lunch/">promised</a>,
the centenary of the Balfour Declaration ought to be a
time for sober reflection. One useful exercise would
be to examine Balfour’s wider record of violence and
racism.</p>
<p>From 1887 to 1891, Balfour headed Britain’s
administration in Ireland. On his appointment to that
post, Balfour proposed to combine repression and
reform.</p>
<p>The repression he advocated should be as “stern” – in
his words – as that of Oliver Cromwell, the English
leader who invaded Ireland in 1649. Cromwell’s troops
are reviled in Ireland for the <a
href="https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/oliver-cromwells-war-crimes-the-massacre-of-drogheda-this-day-in-1649">massacres</a>
they carried out in the towns of Wexford and Drogheda.</p>
<p>Siding with the gentry against what he called the
“excitable peasantry,” Balfour prioritized repression
over reform. When a rent strike was called in 1887,
Balfour authorized the use of heavy-handed tactics
against alleged agitators.</p>
<p>Three people died after police <a
href="http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/29th-march-1963/29/bloody-balfour">fired</a>
on a political protest in Mitchelstown, County Cork.
The incident earned him the nickname of “Bloody
Balfour.”</p>
<h2>Blessings of civilization?</h2>
<p>Balfour penalized dissent. Thousands were jailed
under the Irish Crimes Act that he introduced.</p>
<p>John Mandeville, a nationalist campaigner, was one of
the first to be imprisoned during Balfour’s stint in
Ireland. Mandeville died soon after his release and a
coroner’s inquest attributed his death to
ill-treatment suffered while in detention.</p>
<p>Balfour tried to smear Mandeville by claiming he had
taken part in a “drunken row” before suddenly falling
ill. Mandeville, according to some accounts, was
actually a teetotaler.</p>
<p>Balfour was a British and a white supremacist. “All
the law and all the civilization in Ireland is the
work of England,” he once said.</p>
<p>He used similar terms while defending the subjugation
of other peoples. In 1893, he spoke in the British
parliament of how <a
href="http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32131829">Cecil
Rhodes</a>, an imperial marauder in Southern Africa,
was “extending the blessings of civilization.”</p>
<p>While serving as prime minister from 1902 to 1905,
Balfour insisted that Europeans must enjoy greater
privileges than Black natives in South Africa. “Men
are not born equal,” he said in 1904.</p>
<p>Two years later – then in opposition – he said that
Black people were “less intellectually and morally
capable” than whites.</p>
<h2>Callous</h2>
<p>There are strong reasons to suspect that Balfour was
also anti-Semitic. In 1905, he pushed legislation
aimed at preventing Jews fleeing persecution in Russia
from entering Britain on the grounds they were
“undesirable.”</p>
<p>One reason why Balfour may have been in favor of
establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was that he
disliked having Jews as neighbors. He once described
Zionism as a “serious effort to mitigate the age-old
miseries created for western civilization by the
presence in its midst of a body which is too long
regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was
equally unable to expel or absorb.”</p>
<p>Balfour was often callous. He tried to justify the
use of Chinese slave labor in South Africa’s gold
mines and atrocities committed by British forces in
the Sudan. He opposed giving aid to people at risk of
famine in <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/india">India</a>.</p>
<p>Despite his apparent commitment to law and order,
Balfour encouraged illegal behavior when it suited
him. He was a staunch supporter of militant loyalists
who insisted that Ireland’s north-eastern counties
should not become independent from Britain.</p>
<p>When the Ulster Volunteer Force managed to <a
href="http://www.londonderrysentinel.co.uk/news/carson-s-gun-runner-and-the-mountjoy-ii-1-2105806">smuggle</a>
30,000 rifles from Germany into the north of Ireland,
Balfour effectively approved the 1914 gun-running
operation by telling the British parliament: “I hold
now, and I held 30 years ago that if home rule was
forced upon Ulster, Ulster would fight and Ulster
would be right.”</p>
<p>It was extraordinary that a former prime minister
should voice approval for subversion. Yet that stance
did no harm to Balfour’s political career.</p>
<p>Within a few years, he was back in government as
foreign secretary – it was in that role that he issued
his declaration on Palestine.</p>
<p>The effects of that declaration were swift and
far-reaching. Through pressure exerted by <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/chaim-weizmann">Chaim
Weizmann</a> (later Israel’s first president) and
other senior figures in the Zionist movement, it was
enshrined in the League of Nations mandate through
which Britain ruled Palestine between the two world
wars.</p>
<p><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/herbert-samuel">Herbert
Samuel</a>, himself a staunch Zionist, introduced a
system of racial and religious discrimination when he
served as Britain’s first high commissioner for
Palestine from 1920 to 1925. Those measures
facilitated and financed the acquisition by European
settlers of land on which Palestinians had lived and
farmed for many generations. Mass evictions ensued:
more than 8,700 Palestinians were expelled from
villages in Marj Ibn Amer, an area in the Galilee, as
they were bought up by Zionist colonizers during the
1920s.</p>
<p>Balfour was unperturbed by the upheaval that he set
in motion. Worse, he denied that any problem existed.</p>
<p>In 1927, he wrote “nothing has occurred” that would
cause him to question the “wisdom” of the declaration
he signed a decade earlier.</p>
<p>The remark says much about Balfour’s hubris. He was
prepared to trample on an entire people and to dismiss
their grievances as irrelevant.</p>
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