Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. We are told that on authority. It is a pragmatic truth of authority. Authority is power established in the medium of freedom. Freedom is the market.
Israel was thoroughly immersed in the market before it existed. It was conceived as an ideal and brought into existence by virtue of its success in the market. The founder of the movement which gave effect to the ideal of a Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, was clear about that. It was the immense wealth of the Jewish community in its dispersal around the world, gained in the fluid financial vanguard of market development, that made possible the gradual acquisition of territory by colonisation, and the gaining of the support of a Great Power for the formation of a State, in a world that was already fully occupied.
To say what Herzl said, when arguing that the establishment of a Jewish State was an achievable project, would now be Anti-Semitic. People were expelled from the British Labour Party as Anti-Semites for saying much less during the anti-Corbyn purge.
Origins can be embarrassing. Immaculate conception would be best. The practical function of history is concealment The Jewish State does not want it to be known—or only wants its hard core to know—how it came to exist. The British Labour Party too has much need of forgetfulness on the same subject and—as far as one can tell from the outside—it has truly forgotten the critical part it played in 1947-8 in bringing about the present condition of the Middle East.
The British War Cabinet, which included a Labour representative, made a deal with the leaders of Jewish nationalist colonialism in 1917 to establish a Jewish colony in Palestine and nurture it into a State within the British Empire. This was done as a war measure, to bring Jewish world influence across to the British side. (Jews were seen as virtually German until then, and were penalised as such by Home Rule Ireland.)
Palestinian natives were guaranteed that the Jewish development would not be at their expense.
Thirty years later the Jewish population of Europe had been killed off by a combination of State and popular action but had survived in Russia—where they were an active component of the State. Jews had played a prominent part of the Soviet State from the start, and in 1941 the Soviet State was opened to them. The British State never was.
In 1945 the British Labour Party gained control of Parliament with a large majority and a disabled Opposition.
The Russian Jews who had settled in Palestine declared war on the British administration as an entity that had been useless to the Jewish cause in its emergency. They fought the War by terrorist actions. Britain, which had just ‘won the greatest war ever fought’, surrendered to the terrorists. It declared itself no longer responsible for the governing of Palestine (which they won from the Ottoman Empire in the Great War). The guarantees to the Arabs were forgotten.
The British Labour Government left the way open for Jewish terrorist action against the Arab population. Three years separated the Nakba from the Holocaust. There is little doubt that the two were connected organically.
That is a delicate matter. However, some Jewish writers of that period decided to figure out how 1914 became 1948. And their explanation was the destruction of the Hapsburg Empire by the Allies in 1918-19, and the construction in its place of a series of small nationalist states.
Herzl had envisaged a gradual development of nationalism within the Hapsburg Empire during which adjustments could be made. Nobody had expected the sudden destruction of one Empire by another, and the forced construction of nation-states by Imperialist decree.
The Hapsburg Empire was different in kind from the British Empire which destroyed it. It was not the foreign conquest by a tightly organised nation which drew cheap goods from its vassals. It was in a considerable degree the homeland of the peoples who lived in it. The Jews were one of these peoples. They were in many respects its middle class.
Nations and States may have evolved from it over time. But the British Empire—in its fit of anti-Imperialist fervour as regards conquered Europe in 1918-19—could not wait for evolution. It had to hurry things up by revolution!
The subsequent destabilisation of Europe, along with the ousting of Ottoman rule in Palestine by the victorious Allies, resulted in the Arab and Jewish Holocausts and the general destabilisation of the Middle East.
Brendan Clifford
