Labour’s historical support for the state of Israel predates the Balfour declaration, writes Ian Austin
This week sees the centenary of the Balfour declaration, in which Britain pledged to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
As we celebrate this anniversary and take pride in Labour’s historic support for it, we should we also redouble our efforts to find a peaceful two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with a viable Palestinian state living peacefully alongside a secure Israel.
Three months before the Balfour declaration was published, Labour published its War Aims memorandum, which endorsed Jewish claims to settlement in Palestine.
Labour repeatedly reaffirmed that support over the next three decades, opposing attempts to renege on Britain’s promises and the shameful shutting off of Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939 at the very moment when Europe’s Jews were in maximum peril.
‘It would not have been possible,’ Harold Wilson later wrote, ‘for a political party to be more committed to a national home for the Jews in Palestine than was Labour.’
The cornerstone of Balfour rests on a very simple principle: the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and a state of their own.
The opponents of Balfour, past and present, reject that principle. They have done so for a century and they continue to do so today.
That is why Arab nations invaded the newly-established Israel instead of implementing the United Nations’ partition plan of 1947, which proposed a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and attempted to wipe Israel off the map in 1967 and 1973.
It is why when Yasser Arafat was offered a Palestinian state in 2000 at Camp David, he would not accept that the deal was final because Palestinian claims on the territory of pre-1967 Israel would therefore be at an end.
And it is why Hamas and Hezbollah continue to wage war against Israel and the supreme leader of Iran suggests that the ‘barbaric’ Jewish state ‘has no cure but to be annihilated’.
Those who ask the British government to apologise for Balfour are asking it to accept that the Jewish people have no right to a home of their own. So I was deeply disappointed that, 25 years after the Palestinian Liberation Organisation formally recognised Israel’s right to exist, the Palestinian Authority should make such a demand.
We hear much today about the section of Balfour which refers to safeguarding rights of ‘existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. I have campaigned for a democratic, viable and independent Palestinian state alongside Israel all my life.
Labour rightly supports a two-state solution. There is only one path to its creation: direct, face-to-face negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. This will require painful compromises on both sides and the support of the rest of the world for those willing to make them. Countries like Britain can play an important role, but we have to be seen as honest brokers. Any suggestion that we do not support Israel’s right to exist – by, for instance, refusing to recognise the huge importance of Balfour – will undermine the role a future Labour government might play.
Nor should we forget how Israel upholds the rights of Arab Israelis, the 20 per cent of its population who are not Jewish. All Arab Israelis are guaranteed equal rights under the basic laws and all citizens vote on an equal basis. Visit Israel’s parliament and you will see Arab members of the Knesset representing several parties. Universities, hospitals, public services, the civil service, the army and police are all integrated. Arab Israelis have served in the cabinet, in the civil service and on the supreme court.
Rarely mentioned by Israel’s critics is the fact that Balfour also spoke of the need to uphold the ‘rights and political status enjoyed by Jews’ outside of Palestine, yet more than 800,000 Jews were forced from their homes across the Middle East after 1948. Large and longstanding Jewish communities were decimated. There were 140,000 Jews in Algeria in 1948. Now there are less than 50. There were 75,000 Jews in Egypt. There are now less than 20. And there were 135,000 Jews in Iraq. Today you could count them on the fingers of two hands.
As we mark the events of 100 years ago, we should also look to the future. I want to see Britain do all it can to bring Israelis and Palestinians together, to promote dialogue, build trust and encourage negotiation and compromise to resolve this conflict, so I will keep pushing for Britain to develop closer links with Israel and the Palestinian Authority, promote economic development, trade and investment in the West Bank, reconstruction and demilitarisation in Gaza. Specifically, I am supporting Labour Friends of Israel’s campaign in support of the creation of an International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace which would fund NGOs and projects supporting peaceful coexistence.
That way, as a result this anniversary, we can show that we are for Israel, for Palestine and for peace.
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Ian Austin is member of parliament for Dudley
Via what is essentially a spy network that seems to account for the huge majority of Conservative MPs, the Leadership of what is currently the governing party of the United Kingdom appears to be in the gift of a junior partner in the governing coalition of a state with which this one has no relationship beyond common membership of the United Nations and of its subsidiaries.
A state, moreover, that armed Argentina during the Falklands War, and which was founded, still just within living memory, by anti-British terrorists of the most exceptional viciousness. Terrorism that I know still goes on, because I am a victim of it (http://davidlindsay2020.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/the-most-dangerous-man-in-most.html). That would be taken seriously anywhere other than here in the fiefdom of Boss Henig.
How should Britain mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration? Apparently, by a bout of enforced collective amnesia. But then, it would not be our first of those.
Almost unbelievably more recently than it feels as if it must have been, Britain decided to forget that there had ever been a war in Northern Ireland. That exercise has been as astonishing success. If Jeremy Corbyn’s and John McDonnell’s past in that area affected the outcome anywhere this year, then it won or nearly won Labour certain seats in Scotland, and it helped to pile up the Labour votes in certain parts of England. It certainly did not do Labour any harm.
Corbyn’s enemies ought to be very grateful that that is so, because something very similar to it has happened before. My late father, who was a mild-mannered man, could not look at Yitzhak Shamir on the television. My old Senior Tutor from my undergraduate days, who is still alive, also remembers why. But the origins of the State of Israel have been excised from the British popular consciousness, while the not unconnected, and far more recent, Israeli arming of Argentina during the Falklands War is barely known about at all in this country.
So Corbyn’s enemies can rant on all they like about Hamas and Hezbollah, secure in the knowledge that no one will point out that while neither of those organisations, whatever their other faults, had ever done anything to Britain, there were others in that particular mix who most certainly had done.
The Hamas and Hezbollah business may or may not have enabled the Conservative Party to retain four seats in North West London. Meanwhile, many Labour candidates in London, which bore the brunt of the IRA’s campaign, secured over 40,000 votes apiece, and the party won 49 of London’s 73 seats. Nationally, it experienced under Corbyn its biggest positive swing since 1945. So much, in the great scheme of things, for four seats in one outlying corner of one city.
The price of everyone’s having forgotten about Zionist terrorism, only just into living memory and mostly but not entirely three thousand miles away, is that everyone also has to forget about Irish Republican terrorism, well into the lifetime of almost anyone who is old enough to vote and mostly but not entirely right here. Both of those bouts of amnesia do seem to have happened. But it is quite clear which of them has made more difference.